Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

In the world of the Coen brothers’ new film Inside Llewyn Davis, everything seems to revolve around a single venue known as the Gaslight Café. Every night, a slew of folk acts take the stage and attempt to make an impact in an environment full of performers just like them. One such performer is the eponymous Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), who is so determined to make this his life but cannot find a way to do it for an actual living. He sleeps on a different couch every night, and he gets regular gigs at the Gaslight, but no matter how many times he tries to take a step forward he never actually goes anywhere. This is a phenomenon the film makes explicitly clear, since it more or less begins and ends in the exact same place.

In the case of Davis, however, this immobility is as much his own fault as it is the fault of the environment as a whole. There are plenty of people who want to help him and provide him shelter, including the wealthy Gorfeins (Robin Bartlett and Ethan Phillips), a very nice couple who have offered him so much and yet he feels the need to even poison that relationship. He also occasionally stays at the apartment belonging to fellow singer Jim (Justin Timberlake), whose wife Jean (Carey Mulligan) had a brief affair with Llewyn not long ago. He goes from place to place and couch to couch, accepting the charity of others without ever thinking to give anything back. He is so in the moment that he never stops to assess just where this road is taking him. Based on the evidence within the film, it’s nowhere fast.

While the film itself focuses on the action (and inaction) of its protagonist, the soul of Inside Llewyn Davis is the soundtrack, impeccably produced by T-Bone Burnett and Marcus Mumford. The most mesmerizing sequences of the film are the performances, and the Coens often stop the film dead in its tracks in order to sit back and watch the cast go to work. The film focuses predominantly on the personal problems of Llewyn, but whenever he starts to play his guitar everything else seems to be stripped away. There’s a purity to the performances in this film, and in the one instance when his musical life and personal life are required to intersect, he reacts negatively. Like most Coen character studies, Inside Llewyn Davis is a dark, melancholy movie that doesn’t provide the audience with any real payoffs. But whenever they shoot a musical number, there is almost none of their usual cynicism to be found. Everyone seems to be singing because they genuinely love doing it. It’s a world that seems to be full of promise, but for people like Llewyn it's also quite hopeless.

As with most Coen films, this is less about narrative than it is about offering a brief glimpse into the protagonist’s redundant life. There is an extended diversion in which Llewyn goes on a road trip to Chicago with the quiet Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund) and the brash Roland Turner (John Goodman), who mostly sits in the back of the car and insults Llewyn and the whole idea of folk music at every turn. But even through this apparent left turn, Llewyn’s focus in always on trying to be a professional musician, but that mission is sabotaged at every turn. The most heartbreaking moment in the film comes when he reaches Chicago and auditions in front of Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham), a man who has the power to take his career to the next level. In that brief moment, we see Llewyn let his guard down and pour everything out into one song. When he finishes, the response from Grossman is as crushing as it gets.

The Coens’ usual desire to heap as many things on their protagonist as possible can get a little muddled here, particularly in the case of Llewyn’s relationship with Jean, which probably could have been explored much more than it is. Perhaps that is a useless complaint, since as filmmakers they’ve never been all that interested in spelling things out for the audience. (Or satisfying them at all, really.) Inside Llewyn Davis doesn’t tell the story of Llewyn Davis, but instead simply hops in and follows him for a short period of time before deciding it’s seen enough and rolling the credits. But that modest narrative ambition serves them quite well, and instead of going for “big” moments they focus on capturing all the specifics of the ’60s New York environment. Whenever Llewyn sits down and watches other acts perform at the Gaslight, there’s a feeling that the Coens probably could have made a fantastic movie about any one of the characters sitting in the room. Everyone there is looking to achieve the same goal, and while Llewyn may be quite good at what he does, he could stand to realize that he isn’t so special after all.

Grade: A-