Musicians: Inside Llewyn Davis (Dir Joel and Ethan Coen, 1h48m, 2013)
Cinema loves the musician, loves the drama of being one, loves the complexity of balancing creation and performance and everyday life, and the siren-like call of vices, and self-destruction, or simply selling out. These are dominated by the biopic, from Val Kilmer's doomed but magnetic Jim Morrison and The Doors (1991) to the fractured Bob Dylan in I'm not There (2007) to the younger Dylan in a Complete Unknown and Springsteen in the wilderness trying to make the stark Nebraska in Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere , not to mention the imminent quadruple biopic of the Beatles bearing down on us in April 2028. Elsewhere the musical, like Fame and the thrice-made A Star is Born (1954, 1976, 2018) mix their narrative and their performance seamlessly; then there are the fictional musicians, the focus of this season, though almost all of these films do draw from the lives of real performances for dramatic, or c...
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