The muted, wintry landscape, beautifully rendered by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (expertly subbing for the Coens Bond-bound resident visual genius Roger Deakins), spreads a paralysing chill. As Llewyn couch-surfs around town, even the small task of looking after a ginger tabby cat proves beyond him. But there’s a wider malaise going on here. “And also because you’re an asshole.” Jean has a particular beef with Llewyn, as it may be him and not her sweetly naïve husband / musical partner Jim (Justin Timberlake), who made her pregnant. “You don’t want to go anywhere, and that’s why all the same shit is going to keep happening to you,” rival folk singer Jean Berkey (Carey Mulligan) rants at him. Oh, and he’s a bit of a jerk – an abrasive, anti-social freeloader. It’s not that Davis has no talent: the atmospheric opening scene, all spotlight and cigarette smoke, with Isaac doing his own impressive singing, makes that clear but he can’t seem to catch a break. If Dylan is the self-confident joker flipping lyrics cards in the video to Subterranean Homesick Blues, Llewyn Davis would be skulking around in the alley behind him, like Allen Ginsberg, stranded in the shadows. That he isn’t of course, is the great cosmic joke the Coens play, though arguably with more overt heart and empathy than before. If you’re meant to suffer for your art, then Llewyn Davis should be destined for all-time greatness. He’s already cut a record as part of a duo (Marcus Mumford, minus Sons), whose partner killed himself and now he’s left peddling a solo effort, Inside Llewyn Davis, around Greenwich Village, scraping together coffee shop gigs, getting stiffed by his penny-pinching manager and, in an early scene, beaten up for seemingly no reason. Like Bob Dylan, Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is a Minnesotan Jew who headed to New York – just like the Coens themselves – striving to make it in the early 1960s folk music scene.
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