Critics reviews

As the Greenwich Village folkie with maybe too much integrity, Oscar Isaac's bitter, befuddled, haunted performance is at the heart of the Coens' immersive look at the '60s folk scene. Here's a movie that, like its central character, consciously contradicts itself at every turn. The episodic story is filled with wonderful musical performances, which land halfway between pastiche and earnest re-creation.

Like most Coen Brothers movies, the under-appreciated Inside Llewyn Davis is at once cool, funny, and sobering, as well as bracingly clear in its concerns without ever defaulting to stilted exposition. Employing a flock of fine actors and an improbably resilient cat, the Coens use the brutal winter of 1961 to evoke both the cruelty and the refuge of an epochal Greenwich Village, and to probe the varied sources of folk's steep arc alongside rock ‘n' roll's as a cultural force.

This "folk musical," this "loving re-creation" of the pre-singer-songwriter Greenwich Village music scene of the early sixties, is so finely tuned to daily setbacks and chance reversals and undefinable singularities of mood and behavior that the coherence of straight nostalgia is quickly shattered.

As complicated as memory, and as corrupt as nostalgia, Inside Llewyn Davis, which places a premium on historical fidelity unprecedented in the Coens' filmography (no small feat, considering the likes of A Serious Man and others) produces for the viewer sensations that don't just address "what it was like," but "what it felt like"—affidavit and lyrical reflection somehow entangled and inseparable.

...INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS remains a compelling portrait of an artist whose sense of musicianship is so refined that it leaves no room for the audience. It also manages to describe poverty in the most straightforward and useful terms—an improvised existence without the latitude to act in a so-called 'economically rational' manner. Like a record with the needle stuck in the groove, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS is an enclosed tragedy.

Rather than insisting on a condemning review of Llewyn's character, the film seems to offer a more subtle analysis. Rather than offering his life up for trial, the film's circularity could be metaphorically referring to the repetetiveness of Llewyn's life, and so offers an access point into Llewyn's inner psyche.

There is a reason why this tale of noble failure is titled Inside Llewyn Davis. Like his real-life model Dave Van Ronk, Llewyn and his art are the final gasp of a certain insularity, folk as an inside job. There is also a reason why the Coens show Llewyn's clearest humanist emerge while interacting with and trying to help Ulysses, the Gorfeins' wayward tabby. He is an audience whose responses are unknowable. He is fascinating and soulful, but he refutes any attempt at going "inside."

While A Serious Man's Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is beleaguered by an array of outside forces that invade his life, Llewyn appears bent on engineering traumatic repetitions of his own artistic and emotional low points; he might even be doing himself in. When jazzman Roland Turner... threatens Llewyn with a curse that will leave him searching for the cause of the pervasive misfortune blighting his life, the gag is that no such hex is necessary.

These two musical performances, which call on Isaac as Llewyn to sing his heart out in close-up for two-and-a-half minutes at a time, are as much referendums on the actor's talent as the character's, and it's a testament to the complexity of the Coens' design that the actor succeeds astonishingly well while simultaneously implying that the character may not be as great as he thinks he is.

In a sort of masochistic way (I'm a musician myself that has felt like Llewyn more times than I'd like to admit), I enjoyed the hell out of the film for these reasons, even against my better judgment. In retrospect, I feel skeptical about the film's perhaps too-easy design, which involves trotting out an ensemble that skews a little too neatly towards one-dimensional hostility...

...What makes the new movie a truly great American achievement is that this love of the art is ignited by a friction with some of the worst qualities in people. There's good reason why Jean says—no, barks–"Asshole" to Llewyn's face many more times than his own name.

How could [Llewyn] have maintained a relationship with any woman, let alone a fling with Jean? The answers are less in the writing and more in Isaac's presence. The film is a work of deceptive refrigeration. The character lacks the same sentiment and warmth as the men who created him. It's Isaac who takes some of the chill off. He doesn't cheat in playing Llewyn's selfishness and abrasiveness. But the actor has a charisma that keeps him likable without pleading to be liked.