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 comedic purposes. We will travel with them from 60s New York to 70s London to 80s globe trotting rock excess to the pressure cooker environment of a New York musical conservatory to consider why the musician still remains a quintessentially cinematic figure. What better place to start than the decade that arguably birthed the musician as pop-culture icon, and with the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis, a bitter-sweet portrait of a folk musician (Oscar Isaac, in his cinematic breakthrough role).

Depicting a week in Davis' life, there is a sense of a man beaten down by life, the transitory life of the beat poets and the wandering figures of the early 1960s counterculture refracted down into one man whose luck never seems to change. We follow Llewyn as he drifts around the village New York, sleeping on couches, trying to reconcile with the figure of Jean (a tempestuous Carey Mulligan), falling out with his would-be benefactors, the middle-class Gorfeins and his agent, Mel. Disaffected with folk music, he hitches down to Chicago in the company of jazz musician Roland Turner, (John Goodman, who is at turns menacing and strung out), and beat poet Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund), and slowly wanders back to New York. Llewyn, as Jean spits at one point, doesn't "want to go anywhere". For all his wandering, Llewyn never really seems to get anywhere.

Oscar Isaac is key to this. Without his performance, the film does not work: there is, despite almost everything going wrong for him, despite his arrogance and hipster-ish attitude to the authenticity of folk music, something that rubs up against both the Gorfeins - a scene where he blows up at them for joining in with a song he previously performed as a duo is skin crawlingly embarrassing -and his friends in the folk music, from Jean and Jim (Justin Timberlake) outward, we openly side with Llewyn. Isaac seems permanently, almost existentially tired throughout the film, at one point summing up his situation with "I'm tired. I thought I just needed a night's sleep but it's more than that", though whether this tiredness is with music, or life in general, the film is more candid. 

It is his beaten down, hangdog sensibility that makes us empathise with him, if not identify, and Isaac wears this sensibility like the heavy overcoat he essentially steals from his agent, that 60s folky introspection that his dark shadow, in the form of one Robert Zimmerman, inhabited so well. This inward gaze is captured in film, Isaac giving it the same simple frankness that inhabits his songs. Yet we're kept at at a distance by him, by the Coens, his expression often distant, cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel focusing on the actor's face during these long travelling sequences - despite it being the name of the film, and Llewyn's solo album, we never really get a good look inside the man himself. His life is tragicomic, from his frosty relationship with Jean after getting her pregnant, to his return to the suburbs of his childhood home at turns humiliating at the hands of his sister, (Jeanine Serralles) and depressing, as he visits his ailing father. The world seems to beat Llewyn down constantly and it's very much left up to the viewer as to whether he deserves it. 

There is a dark comedy to his misfortune, the failed solo career as he attempts to pick up the aftermath of a failed double-act, the novelty song he is part of recording, but cannot profit from when it becomes a hit, and even his attempts to leave his life as a folk-singer behind and rejoin the merchant navy is proved futile. His introduction, after all, is being punched several times and left sprawling in the gutter outside the back of the folkclub he's just played in; it's something the film slowly orbits back round to, the biggest joke being played on the unfortunate folk musician that of the arrival of the dimly lit figure in the background as he exits the bar into the street, playing "Farewell".Most notable of all, and giving the first half an hour or so of the film structure, as we follow Llewyn through the village, is the ginger cat with whom Llewyn seems to be inexorably tied. 

The cat is revelatory: whether it represent Llewyn's relationship with music, with fortune, or acts as some representation of himself, but he reveals more in his desperation to find and return one cat, cradling it against his shoulder at one point, and chasing it down a packed subway car, later haunted by another encounter with another animal on the road, than he does in any dialogue or any scene with another human. Regardless of what it represents, it gives us a glimpse inside the man. Inside Llewyn Davis is a film in which, much like the Coen Brothers' previous work, O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) through one folk singer's rambling odyssey across the American North-East, music plays a key part. Music is how we best see Llewyn, what he lives for, despite his 

It is in music, almost all of it played for real in front of camera and curated by T Bone Burnett and Marcus Mumford, from the cartoonish "Please Mr Kennedy" that may change how you look at Adam Driver's film career forever(!) to the deeply affecting "The Death of Queen Jane", to the recursive "Fare Thee Well (Dink's Song)", heard first as the recorded duo with Llewyn and the unseen Mike Timlin, and then Llewyn alone. Yet these too reveal Llewyn; for all his snide comments, and at points confrontational behaviour against the fellow practitioners of folk music, most of these songs he performs are traditional, are authentic in a way that, for all his 60s bohemian posturing, shines through when Llewyn performs. 

For the rest of the film he is obscured, or evasive, but here, we see within to the folk tradition that drives him, the cycling sense of "If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it's a folk song" that drove him and Greenwich Village, and its greatest star onwards to carve through the on-coming counterculture. Like few films about the period, about America in the 1960s, Inside Llewyn Davis uses the trials and tribulations of a down-on-his luck folk-musician to illuminate an era, a style of music that changed the American cultural landscape forever. 

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Inside Llewyn Davis is available via BluRay from Criterion and on streaming on Netflix

Next week, to the 1970s and the chamleonic world of glam rock as a journalist searches for a reclusive rockstar in Velvet Goldmine