Big City Folk: Inside Llewyn Davis - The L Magazine

Inside Llewyn Davis

Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen

What’s wrong with Llewyn Davis? He’s got the goods, as his soulful rendering of “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” makes plain early in the Coen Brothers’ 1960s folk-era film, which believes in its main character most whenever he’s singing (or not allowed to). Singer-schlemiel Davis (Oscar Isaac) pounds the pavement and surfs couches in Greenwich Village and Uptown, but his music doesn’t galvanize the public, and the bad breaks keep coming. Is Davis destined to be the folk scene’s sacrificial lamb to authenticity, or does he regard himself as too pure to pimp his social conscience?

Inside Llewyn Davis doesn’t answer all our questions about the singer, as he schleps his guitar (and someone else’s cat), weathers the tirades of a friend he’s impregnated (Carey Mulligan), and watches other performers cash in on folk’s popularity (in Mighty Wind-y sequences). Rather than tracing the arc of a biopic, Davis wanders down a meandering road taken by other beleaguered Coen protagonists, who usually do a lot of stubbing their toes in the dark, existentially speaking. In Coenworld, you’re doomed if you think you can get away with the money (from Blood Simple to No Country for Old Men), but you’re also a fool when you’re mostly minding your own business: Davis’s interminable struggles recall the Minneapolis math teacher of A Serious Man, with talent to boot (a fact that wasn’t clear about another earnest artist sent down the rabbit hole, Barton Fink).

Davis seems to deserve something more, yet he’s tragically alone even in what’s generally called a community. A last-ditch pilgrimage to a Chicago producer/gatekeeper first requires a long dark car ride of the soul, riding with a spiteful jazz musician (John Goodman) who seems intent on squelching the next generation. Even an attempt to sign up with the Merchant Marine turns into a catch-22. And we don’t know the next verse as in Todd Haynes’s Dylanological medley I’m Not There: it’s not clear that Davis makes it, and a scene of his getting beaten in an alley, repeated as if at the end of a comic strip, doesn’t exactly raise your hopes. He has his role as cynic within the scene, putting down novelty acts, but he’s a man, not a myth (much less a Dude, who at least did his own addled mythmaking).

Isaac (who performs his own songs) allows the Coens to put forth one of their most deeply felt characters, alive and vulnerable and not just the butt of a shaggy-dog story. When DA Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back chronicled Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour in England, the immediacy and the pretenses of both cinema verité and Dylan made for a special alchemy, feeding off the anxieties of a moment, a person, a style of filmmaking. Perhaps, building on A Serious Man, the Coen Brothers have, in resurrecting a world of folk and its jockeying over authenticity, keyed into a level of expression and empathy all the more potent after the long-form pratfalls they’ve orchestrated in the past.

Opens December 6

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