Llewyn Davis is an asshole. His friends know it, his manager knows it, and the orange tabby cat that follows him around knows it. Llewyn, played beautifully by newcomer Oscar Isaac, knows it too — and deep down, he knows it’s the reason he can’t find success as a folk singer in New York’s early 60s Greenwich Village scene. As the big-shot record producer Bud Grossman tells him in the film’s third act, there’s no money in what he does. He just can’t connect with people.
Like the best of Joel and Ethan Coen’s films, Inside Llewyn Davis is a cactus: prickly on the outside, gooey on the inside. There’s no plot, save for Llewyn’s attempts to keep track of a friend’s cat — the film simply summarizes a week in the singer’s life, as he plays gigs for the café crowd, pays for an abortion, surfs couches across Manhattan, and takes a pilgrimage to Chicago in zero below weather.
The Coens deny us any overarching themes or story arcs; characters disappear for days at a time, and several — including Justin Timberlake’s cheerful Jim — duck out halfway through the film, never to return. This isn’t their story. Like it or not, we’re with Llewyn for the long haul, and it’s a credit to Isaac that the cantankerous, cynical folkie never grates.
Though Llewyn’s story is full of poetic nuances and moments of gravity, it’s easy to see the film as a self-indulgent mess of historical revisionism and aimless melancholia. But the Coen’s Joycean approach to filmic narrative — if you can even call it that — paints a broader and more complex picture of the titular character than we might’ve found in a more conventional flick.
Inside Llewyn Davis is a cactus: prickly on the outside, gooey on the inside.
This isn’t to suggest that the film is a boring, intellectualized pile of mush. Quite the opposite, actually: Inside Llewyn Davis is beautifully shot and edited, and its songs — most of which are old standards, save for the charming original “Please Mr. Kennedy” — are remarkably well performed. The acting is great across the board, but Carey Mulligan and John Goodman are in particularly fine form here, as Llewyn’s former flame and a heroin-addled jazz musician, respectively.
Maybe the best thing about Inside Llewyn Davis is that its titular vagrant isn’t great — he’s good, maybe even very good, but not great. Priding himself on his authenticity, Llewyn cringes at the thought of recording a novelty track. He’s a genuine songster, and the industry chews him up and spits him out — Grossman tells him he’s got the chops to sing backup, but not to make it as a leading man. He’s probably right. The Coens don’t shy away from the dark side of being an artist, and the film is all the more powerful for it.
In the final scene, Llewyn leaves a café after a show to confront a shadowy man in an alley, while a young Bob Dylan plays a gig in the background. By the end, he’s lying face down in a gutter, like a character out of a Dylan song. For Llewyn, fame is at arms’ length — all around him, but just out of reach.
