Inside Llewyn Davis is a satisfying, wellstructured and subtle film. In two hours of understated cynicism, fairly mundane events are rendered deeply dramatic: if you’ve never taken a cat on the subway, now is the time to experience the frissons such an endeavour provokes. The film spans one week in the life of
Llewyn, a failing folk singer in Greenwich Village, whose life is a fairly bathetic blip on the orgy of emotion that was the sixties in New York.
The score was written by Dave Van Ronk, a folk singer who really existed and whose life inspired that of the fictional Llewyn. Van Ronk’s music is typical in its deteriorating quality: when Llewyn plays his ‘old stuff’, we feel inspired, but the songs he’s writing by the time we come across him are fairly lacklustre Llewyn’s lack of achievement is is underscored by a ten second shot near the end of the film. The characters are in a dive bar watching hopefuls like Llewyn perform; onstage is a curly-haired, thin-nosed singer, silhouetted sullenly over a guitar. It’s a young Dylan, and the 2014 audience smiles wrily at how inconsequential Llewyn’s life will end up being compared to Bob’s.
Dylan turned the down-and-out existence of a folk singer into a lucrative and prized career, setting the gold standard for future folk singer/songwriters. His sound graduated from the tried and tested folk song; his songs were political, topical and fresh, refuting Llewyn’s maxim, “if it’s not new and it doesn’t get old, it’s folk”. His rejection of society was verbalised in the form of songs like ‘A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall,’ a rally against nuclear warfare that has prompted album sleeves and YouTube blurbs to cheerfully deem it “the protest songs to end all protest songs” ever since. The lyrics are stirring and upsetting even to a fairly politically inactive 20 year old half a century later, making Dylan’s the kind of legacy that will probably endure.
Llewyn’s wanderings needed to be immortalised by the Coen brothers to create any kind of legacy for the score, and his musical career was trumped and roundly eclipsed by another 60s Greenwich Village folk singer. Dylan occupies a paltry 10 seconds in the film of Llewyn’s life, but these 10 seconds are pivotal:the Dylan song in question is the fairly unknown and nostalgically entitled ‘Farewell’. There is also something poignant in the choice of song: folk was getting political and everything was about to change. Someone else is about to realise Llewyn’s dream, and Dylan’s success will inspire and completely eclipse the next generation of Llewyns.
There was an era pre-Dylan, when folk was more about the song than the singer, before the self-important politicising that came out of 1960s and the naval-gazing that accompanied it. In Tom Lehrer’s “The Folk Song Army”, he
parodies the righteous right-on of Dylan’s lyrics, wailing puerilely, “We all hate
poverty,war and injustice/Unlike the rest of you squares”. It’s the petty humanity of this lyric that Inside Llewyn Davis perfectly reflects. It’s not trying to idolise its protagonist or bloat his achievements, and the script is gloriously
apolitical. It’s just one beautifully shot week in the life of one fairly unscrupulous man, with a guitar, some songs and a cat.
