Inside Llewyn Davis

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) covers a week in the life of a folk singer in New York in 1961, and he gets nowhere. Llewyn Davis is a good musician. His partner killed himself and he is trying to continue alone. He has no home; every night he sleeps on somebody else's sofa. His record does not sell, no royalties arrive, his manager is useless. The structure is a circle. The opening and closing scenes are the same, and the week in between changes nothing. The Coens do that deliberately: this is not a story about rising but about someone who does not. What hurts is that he really is talented. In the last scene someone else takes the stage behind him and you realise who it is. The character is based on Dave Van Ronk, a known figure of the Greenwich Village scene who never became large. The Coens started from his memoir. T Bone Burnett supervised the music. The songs were sung and played live on set rather than recorded in a studio and laid over. Oscar Isaac is genuinely playing. A cat is lost and found throughout the film and is the Coens' best source of humour. Bruno Delbonnel's photography is permanently grey and damp; the winter never ends. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes. It runs 104 minutes. Good for: the Coen brothers, music films, and character cinema. Less good for: the character is unpleasant, nothing is resolved, and the tone is bleak throughout.