Inside Llewyn Davis

Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen
Genre: Drama
Starring: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, John Goodman
Distributed by: CBS Films
Release Date: December 13, 2013
My Rating: 7/10

The Coen brothers reunite to tell yet another story. This one is about up-and-coming folk singer in New York's Greenwich Village during the early 1960s. Llewyn Davis (Isaac) is a young broke musician who does not seem to have a fixed home and crashes with different friends every night, including a professor from Columbia University named Gorfein-whose cat he often loses-, his sister and nephew, and a young couple: Jean and Jim Berkey (Mulligan and Timberlake). He attempts to collaborate with numerous other artists, including Jim and another young singer-songwriter named Al Cody, hoping to share royalties with them.
Llewyn soon learns that Jean is pregnant and that she fears the child may be his. Jean then angrily tells him to help her pay for the abortion. Soon afterward, we learn that Llewyn was previously involved with another woman who also decided to receive an abortion after an unwanted pregnancy and move to Akron, Ohio.

Determined to make a name for himself and hopefully gain more royalties for each song he records, Davis heads west to Chicago, hitching a ride with a cynical jazz musician named Roland Turner (Goodman) and an quiet beat poet named Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund). After being detained by a police officer, Llewyn eventually decides to return to New York and settle a deal to pay back his dues and rejoin the merchant marine union, an organization he formerly belonged to.

The film is very poignant, in the sense that the dialogue, music and general mood-as conveyed by the omnipresent bluish and grayish tones as well as the whiteness of winter-all reflect how dark and tense the characters are and how grim the prospects are for this young folk singer who desperately aspires to become a prominent musician like Bob Dylan. Even the seemingly jovial tune "Please Mr. Kennedy," sung by Isaac and Timberlake, contains a dose of pleading fear. Although this appears to be a typical struggling-artist story with a very simple plot, the Coen brothers nevertheless manage to create a very realistic portrait of the perseverance of a man who is mocked, insulted, and screamed at by nearly everyone around him and who seems to be told by most of humanity that unless he ceases to live in a world of idealism and becomes less co-dependent, he will never truly achieve his goals.

Of all the performances in the movie, one in particular stood out for me: that of Carey Mulligan, who plays a frustrated ex-lover of the protagonist, struggling every day to find happiness and remain sane. Mulligan is clearly a one-of-a-kind thespian of her generation, embodying the role of the woman who steadfastly refuses to endure the excuses of a man hoping for a miracle and without the slightest hint of a sense of direction in his life as an artist.

With an incredible soundtrack that includes Oscar Isaac, Marcus Mumford, and the Punch Brothers, Inside Llewyn Davis is a motion picture whose power is undeniable.