It’s easy to imagine how life in Hollywood might distort one’s perception of the relationship between art and commerce. Even a good day—something’s actually getting made!—promises meddling producers, scripts-by-committee, and a vision-compromising fealty to test audiences. And, while getting a film or television show up on screen is a triumph, that sense of victory can quickly turn pyrrhic: just watch any actor or director on a late-night talk show, plugging a film everyone knows is DOA. Which is just a long way of saying it shouldn’t surprise us when a film stumbles trying to capture what it means to make art.

I was thinking about this dynamic recently while watching Damian Chazelle’s Whiplash for the first time. I was hungover and tired, four hours into a flight home from Amsterdam made slightly more tolerable by the fact I was tucked away in a cozy business class pod I’d poached at a bargain at a Schipol kiosk. Whiplash was my second film of the flight—I’d started it right after finishing Burnt, the Bradley Cooper vehicle about a maverick chef’s attempt to reclaim his place in the culinary thermosphere. They two movies seemed so myopic, so daft about creativity, in such similar ways, that even the airline’s precision-tuned hospitality couldn’t stop me from feeling dispirited.

***

In Bradley Cooper’s hands, intelligence is a protean thing—at times a source of charm, at others defensive, even destabilizing—but the effort behind it is always right there on the surface. Good directors make use of Cooper’s neediness. In Silver Linings Playbook, David O. Russell gave Cooper’s self-doubt room to breathe while showing us how his relentless earnestness could become, in the context of bipolar disorder, a threat to self and others. In American Sniper, Clint Eastwood pushed Cooper’s charisma inward, elevating the anxiety and insecurity that drives it. If American Sniper is a story about “genius in crisis,” as Richard Brody once put it, it’s also a story about genius in the making and, ultimately, a story about the self-bargaining and self-deception that brilliance demands. That a sniper’s particular “genius” is lethal is a sly touch, though it doesn’t change the calculus: as the architecture of a soldier’s moral universe begins to crumble, how can he help but crumble along with it? For all his stoicism as an actor, Eastwood makes genius both heroic and fragile.

In Burnt, Cooper plays a genius of a different sort—his sniper slaughtered, his chef simmers and seers. In a former life, the PR copy for the film tells us, Jones was a “two-star Michelin rockstar with the bad habits to match, the former enfant terrible of the Paris restaurant scene did everything different every time out, and only ever cared about the thrill of creating explosions of taste.” Having “lost it all,” the question posed by Burnt is—well, in truth, it’s hard to say. The critics were likewise baffled. (This review does yeoman’s work.) In seeking to show us what it means to create “art”—you know, those exorbitantly-priced dishes, plated and presented in ways that invoke Klee, Miro, or af Klimt—Burnt can’t escape Top Gun-like cliché. It’s the kind of movie where everything gets spelled-out in dialogue, as if the screenwriters were trying to remind themselves of what was going on. “I say to myself,” Uma Thurman’s food critic tells Jones, slipping into the third-person and using their proper names even though it’s just the two of them talking, “‘Simone, you’re a lesbian. Why did you sleep with Adam Jones?’” I am, admittedly, a man of modest social status but I’m pretty sure no one talk like that anywhere.

The answer to Thurman’s question, if you’re wondering, is that everyone sleeps with Adam Jones. Or would if he’d just let them. But Jones is seeking to tame his “bad boy” impulses and the film works diligently to ensure we understand his asceticism as a choice, a symbol of his dedication to craft. When Jones criticizes sous-vide cooking as poaching fish in a “condom,” the point is clear: he’s bareback guy in a world of culinary cowards. Of course, the blurry psychology of sex can obscure a lot of bad intent. And so Jones’ newly-minted asceticism reveals the one-time fuckboy’s inherently manipulative nature—a ruthless, pragmatic calculus that incorporates (though we’re not supposed to talk about it, I guess) blackmail and theft where necessary. Early on, Jones wheedles a fellow restaurateur to fire his head chef, Heléne (Sienna Miller), a single mother, so that she’s forced to work in Jones’ kitchen in spite of her clearly-stated opposition to the idea.

Whither consent? In due turn, he screams at her, assaults her, and fires her. They reconcile, of course, and yet even then he refuses to grant her a half-day off for her daughter’s birthday. Naturally, she develops into a love interest. Pauvré Heléne! She’s hardly alone, though, because the movie makes masochists of all of us. The chefs of Burnt are, on the whole, petulant, talented children who take a kind of survivor’s pride in their cruelty. Abuse is mistaken for competition; competition is mistaken for education. The dominant spirts—petty animus and creative destruction—are constrained only by tenuous norms of loyalty and respect. Until they’re not. By failing to grapple with what any of this means, Burnt betrays its subject by refusing to ask whether Jones’ talents are truly worth all this pain.

In truth, the film shows little interest in the origin and nature of genius. We learn little about Jones’ “difficult” (could it be anything else?) childhood. We gain little insight into his relationship to the food he eats—let alone the kind of intimate details (does he have a go-to food when he’s feeling glum?) that might help us relate. Jones tells us that the kitchen is the “only place he’s every felt like he belonged” and Jones waxes poetic about its “heat, pressure, and violence,” but we’re denied access to it. We never get to feel it.

Instead, the plot takes the easy way out by zeroing in on Jones’ effort to attain an elusive third Michelin star. This is, of course, a real accomplishment, but it has little to do with a chef’s most important, most intimate relationship—the one chef and diner that’s re-enacted nightly, over-and-over again. It is no doubt difficult to make an interesting film about great art—artistic progress often moves at a glacial pace, the product of monomaniacal focus, years of trial and error. The Michelin plot-line is thus a dodge, a way to turn intimacy into a competition. The question Burnt refuses to ask is the only question that matters: is it enough that art can turn our ugliest impulses into someone else’s pleasure?

***

The protagonist of Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller), a freshman at the fictional Shaffer Conservatory, lives for his drums. And, to its credit, the film acknowledges early on that he’s less-than-alive everywhere else—he spends the first fifteen minutes shuffling from frame-to-frame, an amiable but blurry presence. There’s a hint of something darker and edgier, though, in the transparency of his ambitions, the quickness with which he tells people that Shaffer is the best program in the country. That blurriness disappears under the tutelage of Terrance Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), the director of Shaffer’s competitive jazz orchestra. What follows is showy Great Santini-like combat, crackling psychodrama but shitty psychology. As a theory of art, it’s worse.

For Fletcher, the phrase “tough love” is too long by half—only the art matters, he spits, screams, and anyone unwilling to sacrifice everything will be left behind. Questions linger. If he’s such a purist, one can’t help but wonder, why does he rely on extrinsic validation as the measure of success? His jazz band is built for competition, after all, and it’s fair to ask, as one cousin does at an awkward Neiman dinner, how anyone can “win” at jazz when aesthetic response is fundamentally subjective. Fletcher might preach art-for-art’s-sake, but he spends an awful lot of time polishing his trophies.

Whiplash is hardly unique in identifying a thin line between teacher and cult leader. As Fletcher’s jazz-based religion (not this one, alas) pushes Neiman past discipline into the realm of obsession, his control over Neiman’s life becomes total. Emboldened by breadcrumbs of Fletcher’s praise, Neiman asks the cashier at the local art house theater on a date; crushed by his criticism, he breaks up with her. She’s dead weight, he tells her, and his path to glory requires him to travel light. It’s one thing for an artist to sideline those who can’t understand the journey—that’s callous but pragmatic—but Neiman treats his fellow musicians, his would-be peers, with similar contempt. As does the film. We watch him practice alone until his hands bleed, a tortured solitude that ignores the fact that he’s supposed to playing as part of an orchestra.

But that’s the point. In the final scene, a dazzling, tightly-choreographed set-piece, Neiman launches an epic drum solo, dragging the reluctant orchestra into an impromptu rendition of the Tizol and Ellington standard “Caravan.” As the camera circles and tightens on Neiman, the rest of the orchestra recedes, a blur at the margins of the screen. Neiman’s playing is portrayed as an act of visceral, bodily sacrifice: we see sweat bouncing on a cymbal, tiny specks of blood on his kit. This, it seems, is what it takes to satisfy Fletcher, who is suddenly reduced to awestruck cheerleader. What comes next is a small-scale tragedy: we see Neiman’s father, looking on in disbelief from behind the small glass window of a door, unable to understand his son’s genius. Even fatherhood yields to Fletcher. In the process, Neiman becomes the jazz bro’s version of Kubrick’s star-child. Here, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey, solipsism and technical proficiency are mistaken for transcendence. The result is both accomplished and masturbatory. Progress, these allegories tell us, is a solitary journey—those of us in the audience, father and moviegoer alike, are just taxpayers, footing the bill only to be left behind.

***

Ground control to Major Tom? Can great art be created out of solitude and selfishness? Neiman, like Whiplash, is a big believer in personal progress and, like many who see success and self-determination as inevitably, inextricably intertwined, small-c conservative. Neiman draws inspiration from the mid-century virtuoso Buddy Rich, identifies with the jazz of the 1930s, and, as far as one can tell, ignores any music after 1960. That Whiplash fetishizes the jazz tradition doesn’t mean it gets it right, unfortunately. And, by using jazz to tell the story of how a white private school student overcomes his daddy issues by playing drums for Lincoln Center millionaires, the film whitewashes a counter-cultural history inextricably intertwined with Black culture and experience. In doing so, it imposes the same meritocratic myths that justified centuries of inequalities and inequities.

Thankfully, that myth of meritocracy is challenged by Ethan and Joel Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis, which dares to suggest that, because the distribution of talent and success across society is inequitable and arbitrary, what’s special about art is the community it fosters. I choose to think of this as the affirmative flip-side of Hollywood’s obsession with competition—there’s a reason why we call a film a “production,” why the end credits roll on-and-on. If anyone ought to know that it takes a village to make something worthwhile, it’s Hollywood.

Set amid the Greenwich Village folks scene of the early 1960s, Davis follows a few days in the life of its titular protagonist, a folk singer struggling to carve out a recording career. Davis isn’t so different from Jones or Neiman. He’s talented and handsome, enigmatic in that self-interested and sealed-off way that’s often mistaken charisma. Davis, though talented, is not great, and the film asks us to consider the collateral cost of artistic ambition when the artist isn’t a genius. Davis is blind to that, of course—he needs to believe he’s a special talent because it’s the only way to push through the endless obstacles that all aspiring artists encounter. That disconnect is the primary source his problems: he’s like “King Midas’s idiot brother,” he’s told, because “everything he touches turns to shit.” Davis is hungry for commercial success and, more importantly, perhaps, artistic recognition, and, left unsated, turns petty and nihilistic. He’ll heckle a performer onstage or, worse, sleep with married friends.

Inside Llewyn Davis is not a story of redemption. It is not a story of creative success. Instead, it depicts what may be its protagonist’s last days as an artist. Davis is broke, dead-eyed from the day-to-day hustle, exhausted from couch-surfing. No longer young, lacking a record contract, his search for one last opportunity takes on manic intensity. He ignores the odds and forgets a hard lesson born of his own experience: artistic success can be its own kind of failure. The film lingers, awkwardly, painfully, on remaindered copies of his first and only album. In a sense, Davis has reached a point of internal bargaining, where another opportunity would be nothing more than a payday loan, a usurious line of credit parlayed into one last bad bet. Worse, his focus on the business of music threatens his connection to the art, itself. One evening, after dinner with his kindly middle-aged patrons, the wife asks Davis to sing for them. He demurs. She struggles to understand his hesitation—music is supposed to be “a joyous expression of the soul,” she says. But Davis is past joy. The difference—a major reason why Inside Llewyn Davis is a great film and Burnt and Whiplash are not—is that the Coens recognize this as a tragedy not an ethos. 

****

It’s a refreshingly small-scale tragedy, not a matter of life-or-death. Davis continues to be cared for by those around him, by both fellow artists and his art’s appreciators, who support him (even when they don’t particularly like him) by providing him with meals and shelter, finding him jobs, helping him line up performances. These artists are in competition, of course—all of them long for individual success—but that competition is, itself, a kind of collaboration. They struggle together. Watching, I thought of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” Like Whiplash, it’s the story of a young jazz musician. Narrated by the title character’s estranged brother (a high school teacher, like Neiman’s father), it concludes with Sonny’s return to the stage after a drug-related prison stint. Baldwin’s depiction of the performance describes an act of generosity and reciprocity that extends between musicians and out toward their audience:

And as though he commanded, Sonny began to play. Something began to happen. And Creole let out the reins. The dry, low black man said something awful on the drums, Creole answered, and the drums talked back. Then the horns insisted, sweet and high, slightly detached perhaps, and Creole listened, commenting now and then, dry, and driving, beautiful and calm and old. They all came together again and, and Sonny was part of the family again. I could tell this from his face.

In the ebb-and-flow of the on-stage conversation, Baldwin provides a compelling argument for the pain (collateral and otherwise) we accept as the price for art. But real genius, he suggests, resides in the performance, not the individual, which makes it a fleeting thing, existing “only for a moment” before it releases us back into the world, where “trouble stretches above us, longer than the sky.” For Baldwin, the quintessential outsider, this is not—cannot be—a lonely act:

Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, and what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did. Yet, there was no battle in his face now, I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in earth. He had made it his: that long line, of which we knew only Mama and Daddy. And he was giving it back, as everything must be given back, so that, passing through death, it can live forever.