What's the difference between a drummer and a drum machine? You only have to punch the information into a drum machine once. What do you call a drummer with half a brain? Gifted. Boom-tish.

Or perhaps you prefer something more whimsical? Two cowboys are waiting for the Indians to attack their fort, listening to the war drums. One cowboy says to the other: "I don't like the sound of those drums." From across the plain comes a distant voice: "He's not our usual drummer!"

Most drummers like the drummer jokes. They have a long pedigree that's to do with the primal African nature of the instrument, and the idea that anyone can do it. "Banging on the bongoes like a chimpanzee" as Mark Knopfler sang in Money for Nothing.

In 1959, Sal Mineo played a young man trying to counter his father's opposition in The Gene Krupa Story, one of the few Hollywood biopics about a drummer. "Dad, did you know that drums are the first instrument man ever played?" asks Sal, shining like a young Brando. His dad puts a fist through his traps.

Drummers are big in movies right now, probably for the first time. The score of Birdman features drumming by Mexican virtuoso Antonio Sanchez, although he's not the one we see in the movie (that's Nate Smith). Drumming provides the film's score, with snippets of classical music. It's so innovative that even the composers who vote for the Best Original Score in the Oscars failed to recognise it with a nomination. He's only a drummer, after all.

The other big noise is Whiplash, which was nominated for best picture. It's the story of a 19-year-old drummer, Andrew Neiman (played by Miles Teller), who comes up against a cruel and unusual teacher, Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons). Fletcher throws a chair at his head, slaps his face and reduces him to tears – and that's just their first practice session. Simmons took the Oscar for best supporting actor last week, but Teller has the more complex role. He also has to play the drums, which he does with a high degree of skill. That's almost unheard of in a musical biopic.

Some pros have said they can tell that Teller isn't playing in some of the big scenes – but few non-drummers, or even basement bashers like me, can pick that. Damien Chazelle, who wrote and directed the movie, has said that Teller plays about 90 per cent of what we see on screen – although no-one has yet said who's playing the real stuff on the soundtrack that Teller emulates.

There are so few movies about jazz musicians, and so few good ones, that you might think the jazz community would embrace Whiplash, but the response has been sniffy. The New Yorker's film blogger Richard Brody, a jazz lover, called the jazz in the film "mediocre", before moving in for the kill: "The movie's idea of jazz is a grotesque and ludicrous caricature". Drummer Peter Erskine, who played with Weather Report, is critical of Fletcher's bullying. "Being a jerk is ultimately self-defeating in music education," he says. "A conductor or bandleader will only get good results if he or she shows as much love or enthusiasm as the discipline or toughness they dole out."

Others have criticised the film's relentless misery in the depiction of what a young drummer has to go through to become great. We see Miles practising till his hands are bloody and broken, throbbing with so much pain that he plunges them into a jug of iced water. Ouch. Could this be true?

The film is at least partly autobiographical for Damien Chazelle. He studied drums at a music school like the one in the movie, and his teachers played hardball. "This is not everyone's experience of jazz," Chazelle said recently, "but my experience was as a young drummer not too dissimilar from in the movie, with a very strict teacher and a very cut-throat jazz-education program, and the tenor of that program and that world was competition, hostility and stress, and all the kind of things I wanted to put on the screen in this movie… It wasn't the laid-back, after-hours jazz club, smoking-a-cigarette and noodling-on-the-piano sort of thing – it was very much the opposite, it felt more like the military… It's always been a big part of the music and one that I think we don't see on film enough."

That's what I loved about Whiplash. Not the bullying, but the sense of hard work that Andrew goes through. Most biopics about artists skip the hard work – the so-called 10,000 hours that it takes to become good at something – and concentrate on the downfall, usually through drugs and drinking. Chazelle strikes a blow for reality here. Whiplash is all about the practice, even if the idea of doing it till your hands bleed is not good pedagogy. And the jazz in the film is not "mediocre". The big band that Fletcher conducts is as tight as a drumhead – even if they're all terrified of their conductor.

The film is really about the fear of mediocrity, and the terrible cost for someone who might not make it. That's the opposite of most biopics, which concentrate on the catastrophe of success. So finally, to even the score, a conductor joke. What do all great conductors have in common? Answer: they're all dead.

Twitter: @ptbyrnes