Inside Llewyn Davis 2013

Director: Ethan Coen/Joel Coen Starring: Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, Ethan Phillips, Robin Bartlett, Max Casella, Jerry Grayson, Jeanine Serralles, Adam Driver, Stark Sands, John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund and F. Murray Abraham

With a Coen movie, you can’t always take things at face value. The ‘True Story’ claim at the beginning of ‘Fargo’ (both the movie and each episode of the TV series) is simply false. It is there to establish a mood. By contrast, while ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ makes no truth claims, it does incorporate a great deal of truth.

It is about a somewhat unpleasant character—Llewyn Davis; a struggling folk-singer in the Greenwich Village of 1961. The Coen’s specifically chose this because this is just—literally—moments before one Robert Zimmerman becomes known, and becomes the dominant perception of folk music for a decade.

Davis has little money, a record (‘Inside Llewyn Davis’) that isn’t selling, a girl who’s pregnant and wants him to pay for the solution, and an irritable personality. But he sings nicely and plays his guitar well. The story—which at one point turns into a strange road trip— is interesting, and studded with fine folk songs.

That presents a problem for the casting director. Oscar Isaac, who plays Davis, actually can sing. Indeed on Hang Me, Oh Hang

Me, with which the movie opens, his rendition sounds a lot like a 2001 recording by Dave Van Ronk, whose memoir of the ‘60s folk scene fuelled the screenplay. Carey Mulligan also manages to produce that straight-haired sweet singing that marked the female folksters, while her significant other is played here by an excellent Justin Timberlake.

The general ambience and look seem mostly true to 1961… although IMDB can give you a list of real errors, thanks to the alert eyes of millions. But one anachronism this movie shares with dozens of others is that there are no old cars. Certainly there are plenty of cars made in 1961 or earlier that are driving around in various scenes, but none of them are clunkers. If you’re hiring fifty-year-old cars, the available ones are typically beautifully preserved or carefully restored. In this kind of movie, there are no dented or dinged or rusty cars.

Shot on film, the Blu-ray renders the dark and sometimes smoky atmosphere beautifully. The music is deliciously presented in 24-bit DTS-HD Master Audio, but the highlight of the sound for me was the opening seconds of the movie, with the surround sound delivering an astoundingly accurate acoustic sense of the Gaslight Cafe, the quiet murmurs of the patrons, the muted tinkle of glasses. I might as well have been there. Stephen Dawson