Whiplash is one of my top 5 favorite movies, so when it came back to theaters for its 10th anniversary, I had to see it.

What drew me to it in the first place in 2014 was its central theme of obsession — Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) is a music student driven to excel at a music conservatory, where he comes under the tutelage of Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), a teacher known for verbal and physical abuse. Fletcher repeatedly references an (embellished) story about jazz legend Charlie Parker being attacked by a band leader to illustrate his belief that talent isn’t enough — students need to be pushed past their limits to truly excel. The story soon turns into a series of tumultuous back-and-forths as Neiman seeks Fletcher’s approval and Fletcher keeps pushing him past the point of discouragement. Both are locked into an obsession they can’t leave.

Whiplash can be a difficult movie. It’s a triumph of movie soundtracks (dig all that jazz), Simmons absolutely earned his Best Supporting Actor Oscar, and it’s electric from start to finish. It’s a masterfully made movie that does a great job sucking you in to the feeling that studio band is the only thing that matters… but it’s colored by its reputation of primarily being about an abusive band teacher, which is admittedly not easy to watch. Fletcher employs every psychological trick in the book to belittle his student musicians, including an enormous amount of homophobic language.

Watching it now 10 years after its release, especially after the rise of a sphere of angry men yelling that you should DO WHAT THEY THINK and ONLY THEY HAVE THE ANSWERS, what I think makes the film fantastically complicated is that Fletcher and Neiman are both toxic men, in different ways. Neiman is not an innocent being corrupted; from the very beginning, he chafes under the unconditional love of his single father (played by Paul Reiser), he’s hungry to be recognized as one of the all-time greats (and is willing to go to any length to get there), and he looks down on anybody who isn’t similarly driven. We see also that Neiman has potential friends (Ryan Connolly, a more masculine-presenting band member who goes out of his way to defend him and be kind to him) that he ignores and puts down when they get in his way.

If I can borrow some terms from erroneous wolf research: If Fletcher is a swaggering “alpha male” who freely abuses his social power, Neiman is a powerless “beta” obsessed with becoming the alpha male himself. He flirts a few times with letting go of his fixation — mostly by dating Melissa Benoist, who (like Reiser) futilely tries to drag Neiman back to humanity — but ultimately his hero is a brilliant musician who drove himself to extremes, and that’s the path Neiman is set on following no matter what.

Speaking of Benoist, one thing that for me reinforces how Whiplash is about toxic masculinity is how uninterested both Neiman and Fletcher (and by extension, the movie) are in women. Fletcher’s created an all-male studio band, and that’s not by accident. He’s dismissive of the one female student he engages with; while he’s disparaging to every student he encounters, with her he makes it about her looks. I think there’s an argument to be made that Neiman’s drive comes from the trauma of his mother leaving him for reasons he will never understand (though it feels a bit pat; his dad being a pushover and his extended family being uninterested in him don’t help), but the studio band feels like a hierarchy of a society without women, with everybody constantly expressing stress and resentment as they scramble for position (thinking particularly of Carl Tanner, who sees Neiman as a rival for the core seat he worked so hard for) and with so many of Fletcher’s quips being homophobic.

I admit I haven’t seen any of Damien Chazelle’s other movies (except 10 Cloverfield Lane, which I don’t think has a lot in common with this movie), so I couldn’t compare this movie to La La Land, his bigger success. I’ve heard that this movie is based in part on Chazelle’s own experience in music education; I’ve also heard the argument that Whiplash actually hates jazz, that it misses the point of jazz, and I would agree with that up to a point. I see it as a movie about people who want to be good at jazz and make a career out of it, and who probably loved jazz at one point but are now so driven by technical accomplishment they don’t even hear the music anymore. The only person in the movie who looks like they’re having any fun is Fletcher during the very last performance.

What the movie is really about is obsession and toxic masculinity, and that’s why it sticks with me 10 years later. That and the soundtrack. Seriously, I can’t praise it enough.