Inside Llewyn Davis Review - Life before Bob Dylan
Sometimes, without considering commercial success or studios’ pressures, Joel and Ethan Coen satisfy themselves with moments of pure and complete independence, accomplishing against-the-tide works like Barton Fink, back in 1991. This time, the Coen brothers write and direct a movie inspired by the life of folk singer Dave Van Ronk, friend (and precursor) of Bob Dylan, famous with his nickname “The Mayor of MacDougal Street” (which is also the title of his autobiography). With the names changed and some events totally imagined, the Coens realized one of their most curious and fascinating movies yet.
Everything begins in New York City, 1961: Llewyn Davis is a folk singer with no perspective of success, a man with a lot of talent but almost no personal initiative, who makes a living out of singing a night after the other in the same cafe, sleeping on the couch of a random friend every different night. His already complicated life becomes even worse when Jean, married with his friend Jim Berkey, tells him she’s pregnant, probably of him, and pretends Davis to help her “solve the problem”. Alone, with no money, forced by circumstances to take care of a cat that is not even his own, Davis will start a trip through America to raise some money in order to help Jean and to put back in order his life….but the future doesn’t really offer many perspectives.
The Coen brothers took some episodes from the singer’s life, changed his name and created a total loser out of him, a man doomed to be out of place in every environment, haunted by tough luck and penalized by the lack of personal initiative and responsibility. Oscar Isaacs gives birth to a character who lives in a moment of transition for American culture and music, and his Davis is too much ahead of times to belong to the former generation, but also lacks the determination to reach the following one. The protagonist sistematically loses every occasion he finds to succeed, both in music (giving up the royalties of his only successful song) and in his private life, missing a deviation to Akron that could have changed his life.
Davis’ story becomes that of a whole nation, a country always hanging between too old and not yet new (“If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song” repeats Davis to his audience every night). The Coens’ style often turns to surreal, between interchanging cats, a heroin-addict and black-magic-expert jazzman (the phenomenal John Goodman), and a conclusion that repeats almost frame by frame the incipit, the sign of a life always identical to itself, destined to be repeated infinitely like a punishment from Dante’s Inferno (only a fleeting apparition of Bob Dylan on the stage of Gaslight Cafe might mean that indeed times are a-changin’).
The Coen brothers film it all with an enviable fluidity, a technical expertise that has finally reached perfection. They clearly have quite a taste for dreamlike and surreal atmospheres. The Coens created a modern times odyssey (clearly with no connection to their previous one, O Brother, Where Art Thou?) that brings the spectator into the heart of a man which is also the heart of a whole country, a microverse full of contraddictions and good intentions, of flaws and virtues, in a never ending walk towards self-accomplishment.