Down-and-out folk singer Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) has little to his name but his guitar and a thin corduroy jacket, pulled tight against a cruel New York winter in 1961. He is homeless, and has not seen a dime of royalties from his first solo album. Inside Llweyn Davis, the transfixing new feature from Ethan and Joel Coen, follows the titular starving artist for roughly a week as he couch-surfs through Greenwich Village, the Upper West Side, and Queens (with a brief sojourn to Chicago). During this time, Llewyn hustles for gigs, alienates his friends, and mopes about his diminished fortunes.
Inside Llewyn Davis is an oddly compelling and devastating film, its raw materials excavated from the same coal-black fissures as the Coens’ masterpiece of theodicy, A Serious Man. However, where the latter film showered poor schlimazel Larry Gopnik with a sudden downpour of ill favor, Davis depicts the grinding disillusionment of consistent hard luck, the kind reserved for musicians. At one point, the film actually laps itself, revealing a structure akin to a Möbius strip, and highlighting that Llewyn’s travails have no beginning or end.
As one expects from the Coens, Inside Llewyn Davis is formally peerless, from its desaturated, glowing colors to its stirring folk soundtrack overseen by T Bone Burnett. Although it is centered (spiritually and geographically) on the Village just prior to the folk revival, Davis is not really a work of musical history. Rather, it is a broad rumination on failure, loss, regret, and their embittering effects. In short, it’s old hat for the Coens. However, the brothers have never made a film quite like Davis, which sharply expresses how it feels to be utterly without plans or hope for what the future may bring.
