Mixed feelings. Ultimately, you can make this same movie about just about any activity and it'll play out about the same. In my life as a professional musician who has played some very high profile gigs and with some remarkable players that level of exacting standard depicted in the film is not something I've ever really come across. That said, I can remember to when I was a teenager and still very much a beginner having teachers that felt as scary or intimidating or whatever but obviously not to the extreme shown in the movie. But the funny thing about that is looking back, they weren't scary, I was just inexperienced and a lot of the things that used to stress me out are child's play today(and ironically, Caravan was a tune we used to play)

Fletcher was an interesting character though and a great performance. But I did find the premise flawed from the onset which is that whole 'to be one of the greats you have to forge yourself in a crucible of unrelenting drive' as it applies to music but especially as it applies to jazz music. Because realistically, if we're being perfectly honest, even the greats weren't that exacting(as in to the movie's standards), and you listen to their records and you'll hear out of tune notes, you'll hear unsteady beats, you'll hear inconsistencies, even outright editing and studio tricks where applicable, which is not to mention that lo-fi recordings mask imperfection to a degree in the first place. But more to the point, a lot of these guys did what they did because that's what they did and they did it a lot not because they were being abused by a sociopath to be better or because they were jumping into the fire, and the idea that that's what a 19-year-old(or however old Andrew was supposed to be) has to do to 'get there' is just kind of misplaced.

Fact of the matter is the next 'bird' doesn't come from someone who is just more unrelenting in walking the same path that someone else set, it comes from someone who makes a new path for others to walk on. Miles Davis doesn't go down as an all-time great because he zipped through bop standards more perfectly and more maniacally than anyone, he goes down as an all-time great because he saw the world of bop and took a left turn away from it and then again when 'cool' became a thing taking a left turn from that too(into his electric/fusion/atonal stuff). He always worked with high standards and he was a demanding band leader but that's not really where 'it' was because a lot of that stuff is just the appetizer where a movie like Whiplash treats it as the main course.