The Coens in a minor key

Rating: 6/10 (30 March 2014)

Llewyn Davis is, what one of the characters in the movie calls, a "loser." That is, a struggling folk musician in 1961 Greenwich Village who's so bad off he doesn't even have a place to call his own. Instead, he's been reduced to sleeping on friends' couches for as long as they're willing to put up with him. Then it's on to someone else's place (he seems to have a rotation system set up amongst a group of regulars). Llewyn has also recently become a solo act following the suicide of his partner, and no one seems much interested in hiring Llewyn to play on his own. To further complicate matters, it seems Llewyn might just have impregnated his best friend's wife during a recent one-night stand, a woman, by the way, who really can't stand a thing about Llewyn, least of all the prospect of being a mother to his child.
In comparison to the flamboyance of some of their more recent works such as "No Country for Old Men" and "Burn After Reading," "Inside Llewyn Davis" finds Joel and Ethan Coen at their most subdued, spare and inward-looking. More somber mood-piece than narrative-driven drama, this is what we get when the boys decide to compose in a minor key. As such, the movie may try the patience of some in the audience and appear too slight to others, especially with its lack of a clear-cut resolution come fadeout time. The movie becomes especially stripped-down when Llewyn heads off on his own to Chicago in search of a gig, sharing a ride with an enigmatic and eccentric musician/heroin addict played by who else but John Goodman (this IS a Coen brothers movie after all).
Llewyn finds his identity and purpose in music and in the counterculture persona he displays to the world. The only trouble is that, while he feels superior to all the unenlightened "squares" whom he sees as having sold out to the Man and to crash commercialism, he's still dependent on those people to lend him a helping hand. After all, what's the point of being your own man when you have to keep throwing yourself on the mercy of others just to find a warm place to bed down for the night? Llewyn's troubles seem to be the result of a combination of factors: a lack of ambition, grief over his partner's death, and his decision to hide behind nonconformity as a justification for never growing up and never accepting the responsibilities that come with being a man. It could also be that he's just a bit of a jerk by nature.
Oscar Isaac gives an effectively understated performance as the title character, and the rest of the cast (including Carey Mulligan, F. Murray Abraham, and Justin Timberlake) is fine as well. Bruno Delbonnel's cinematography is starkly beautiful, especially in those scenes set against the bleak landscape of a wintry Midwest.
"Inside Llewyn Davis" isn't quite the engaging survey of the music scene or of Bohemian life in that specific place and time that the critics have claimed it is (the soundtrack is not really all that impressive), and it is no crowd-pleaser by any stretch of the imagination, but if you lower your expectations a mite, you may just get find yourself getting into its subdued portrayal of a social misfit.