Llewyn Davis has a very, very bad week

Rating: 4/10 (4 January 2014)

Because there is no arc to the character--and only a loose and very arbitrary arc to the film, Inside Llewyn Davis is ultimately an empty exercise in black and white photography. (Although it is a great audition tape for Oscar Isaac. If anyone is thinking of remaking Serpico, here's your star.)
Inspired by a biography ("The Mayor of MacDougal Street") of folk music legend Dave Van Ronk, the screenplay is only a very superficial skim of the scene. And acclaimed music producer T-Bone Burnette is out of his depth in that role for the film.Where he worked with genuine bluegrass artists like Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch on O Brother, Where Art Thou, here he's on his own. He doesn't have roots in folk music (he's an LA rocker) and, like the Coen Brothers, is too young to have been part of the early Sixties NY scene depicted here. It leaves him unable to provide any insights into the music or musicians.
The film picks up Davis at a bad point, follows him through several more of them in a very bad week, including a hellish odyssey to wintry Chicago, then stops--as the opening scene is (without explanation) repeated. If the movie had started a month earlier or a year later, the journey would be totally different. (Five years later and he'd be playing with the Lovin' Spoonful.) This can be read strictly as the fault of the screenwriters. You never see Davis at rest and only fleetingly at work. Davis himself is neither a bad person nor a bad musician. He's good looking, audiences are enthusiastic and he's a terrific singer and picker. He's recorded two albums. He's attractive to women. His personal relationships are a little tangled though he has a set of friends who are more than willing to feed and shelter him. But like most musicians at the beginning of their professional careers, he's sleeping on other people's couches and scrambling for gigs and money.
There are a few interesting acting bits by Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, Garrett Hedlund and Coen stalwart John Goodman. F. Murray Abraham has some brutally amusing scenes as an imperious club owner. But in the end, it's a frustratingly wasted look at a pivotal point in American music.