Jean: Do you ever think of the future at all?
Llewyn: The future? You mean like flying cars? Hotels on the moon? Tang?
The weekend before last I watched Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis for the fourth or maybe fifth time. The first time I saw it I felt it was a bit of a missed opportunity, too glum, too cold, too downbeat to be fully enjoyed. The gorgeous T Bone Burnett arrangements were lost in the grim, Joblike odyssey of the world’s most disagreeable folk singer, played by the never-more-handsome Oscar Isaac. But I went back for another go, and this time I vibed a lot better with it, the black humour, John Goodman’s nasty jazzman and an indeterminate number of cats. After the latest viewing I think it might be my favourite film of all time.
Inside Llewyn Davis ran into a little controversy when it first opened, because the Coens made the mistake of showing their work, citing Dave Van Ronk's classic Greenwich Village memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street as a particular influence. Many made the obvious jump and imagined this was a thinly veiled biopic.1 Thus they cried foul: Llewyn Davis is a miserable sad sack, a spiky, disagreeable outsider. As Carey Mulligan’s Jean roars at him, “you’re a reverse King Midas: everything you touch turns to shit.” Dave Van Ronk was everyone’s pal: a friend, a mentor, the rock on which Dylan built his church. Besides, he was about nine feet tall, a shaggy, friendly bear who exuded goodwill to all men. The Coens were quick to deny the links. Van Ronk was just one of many inspirations for the title character, who had slices of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and countless others. But as always, they weren’t telling the whole truth.
Doubles, doppelgangers and stand-ins abound in their world. Walking crew cut Troy Nelson is a dead ringer for Tom Paxton, a man so square that when he arrived in the Village people thought he was an undercover cop. They even share a posting at Fort Dix, New Jersey.2 Bud Grossman, played by the granite-faced F. Murray Abraham, is a guardian of the Gate of Horn only a few shades removed from Albert Grossman, the real manager and owner. There are even a few knock-off Clancy Brothers, presumably bought cheap because of their suspiciously American-sounding singing voices. The more unflattering the portrayal, the more cryptic the association. The real Moses Asch wasn’t the sly nonsense merchant Mel Novikoff depicted, and Jim and Jean could be any number of pairings.
The year is 1961, and the season is winter. The film has that bone deep cold of damp apartments,saturated socks and blazers worn as winter coats. One of the sources of Llewyn’s misery seems to be that he has no realistic prospect of ever being warm again. He travels from unfortunate accident to bad decision, from New York to Chicago and back again. Tide goes out, tide comes in. He alienates the people who love him, and they take him back anyway. He promises not to play the Gaslight for the four hundredth time, and he plays the Gaslight for the four hundredth time. He gets beaten up by an angry husband, though not the one you might expect. But whenever the film stills and he takes out his guitar, the music takes the breath from your throat. If the old folks are treated a little carelessly, the songs are held in gloves of velvet. There is no one like the Coens for sitting with a song until it finishes. As Llewyn plays us through the tragic life of poor Queen Jane, you’re sure, so sure that it was all worth it. This will be his break. And even if it isn’t, wasn’t it worth it anyway?
Enjoying this post? Send it to your dad or your aunt or something, they’d like it. They’re into folk music. Probably.
I don't see a lot of money here.
Another major criticism levelled at the film is its distinctly apolitical shrug. This isn’t strictly fair either. The year is key. Our collective cultural memory of the folk revival abounds with images of lefties on guitars and dulcimers, inveighing against the war and the bomb and those misguided sons of Mississippi. But this is 1961. The old left has grown old, and the new one isn’t born yet. The older folkies had been badly battered by McCarthy and the constraints of the Cold War. Pete Seeger and the Weavers were beggared by the blacklist. Alan Lomax spent much of the ‘50s in self-imposed exile. Phil Ochs, the most overly and consistently political of the sixties folk singers, wouldn’t come to the Village for another year. The first real anti-Vietnam War anthem, Ochs’ Vietnam Talkin’ Blues, appeared in ‘64.
The real omission is the civil rights movement, and the many songs and singers that accompanied it. A very fair criticism of the film is the almost complete lack of black characters, a persistent issue in the Coen Brothers canon. There is no Odetta or Paul Robeson stand-in, nor a Harry Belafonte one. ‘61 was the year of the Freedom Rides, and the fusion of left wing folk music with the traditional music of African Americans into effective and powerful works of artistic protest. But there is no Guy Carawan here. Such vibrant solidarity doesn’t fit within the desaturated frame of Inside Llewyn Davis. Perhaps they knew this, and elected to leave it out entirely rather than make a half-gesture.
What little politics appear are gnomic; delivered from the side of the mouth. In Please Mr. Kennedy, what might have been a protest song against the Vietnam War becomes an absurd plea from a reluctant astronaut being sent to space against his will. After being told by an unsympathetic union rep that he can’t ship out with the Merchant Navy again, Llewyn asks, “Why? Cause I’m a Communist?” to which the rep quickly mumbles, “Shachtmanite?” Shactmanites were the followers of Max Schactman, a real life figure more ornery than Llewyn himself. Shachtmanism was a peculiar ideological dead end, a personality cult that helped to keep the American left peripheral and divided for much of the 50s and 60s. Radical politics in Coen Brothers pictures are usually played for laughs, think of the genial communists of Hail Caesar! Part of you wishes the Coens would do a film about the mid-century left, just to get it out of their system.
These criticisms aside, what makes this such a special film in my eyes? At heart, I’m a folk music guy. It’s something many of us have to come to terms with at some point in life. I can’t resist the songs, but there is something else. After a few viewings you start to notice the pattern. It begins where it ends, with Llleywn getting punched in the face and left in a rain slick alley. He plays, he scratches a living, he sleeps on someone’s couch, and tomorrow he does it again. The song is the same, but played a little different every night. The whole film is a folk song, as played by Joel and Ethan Coen. And this is where the criticisms all miss the mark. This is the story of Dave Van Ronk, sure, but played as a sad song. Van Ronk never got famous, but it didn’t matter, he had a pretty good time just getting along. Inside Llewyn Davis asks, what if you never got famous, and felt really bad the whole time? The Streets of Laredo isn’t The Unfortunate Rake, but if you’re not paying attention they sound the same.
Folk music is about eternal recurrence, a theme the Coens aren’t exactly new to. The story of the sixties, like the songs themselves, don’t belong to anyone. They can be picked up and used whatever way you like. Which leads neatly to the final stroke of the film. Llewyn plays to modest applause and a few dollars shared from the basket, and he exits stage left to meet his fate. A new kid takes the stage and plays the film out. The song is Farewell and the singer is Bob Dylan, name and all. The man with the made up name and a thousand phoney backstories is the only real character who appears.3 The choice of song is clever, as it was one of Dylan’s first controversies. It was built on the bones of The Leaving of Liverpool, just as With God On Our Side took more than a little from Dominic Behan’s The Patriot Game.4
Dylan was, at best, light fingered with others work, something which caused no end of trouble in his early career. This would not have been as much of a problem had he stayed at the level of modest local fame of those around him. But Dylan’s star was such that it distorted the old mechanics of folk music. If you take a song and rewrite it a little and it becomes a hit, everyone who played it before you becomes a retroactive plagiarist in the eyes of the public. The Coens fiddle with the lyrics and play a new version of the story, but Inside Llewyn Davis was at best a minor hit. By virtue of its minor key, its difficult appeal, it escapes the charge of overwriting history.
What did I steal? Did I steal the word the, the word a, the word so? Everybody has to get their words from somewhere. Woody didn’t write 10 original melodies, but nobody ever called him a thief
- Bob Dylan on accusations of plagiarism5
Dylan becomes so large in the film, as in real life, that his authenticity is ratified simply by presence and magnitude. This isn’t about talent, though Dylan has more than enough. Timing is everything, and Llewyn has the misfortune of arriving a little too early. Flexibility is what matters, and Llewyn is just a little too reverential, too prickly, too rigid. He moves in cycles, in recurrences and circuits. But Dylan is the external actor that breaks the loop, the orthogonal force that takes, and absorbs, and remakes and reshapes reality around him. For the Coens, there is nothing to be done but to sit in the alleyway, and wait for the future to arrive.
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Extras/Would Reccomend
Reading: “Long Live the Post Horn!” - Vigdis Hjorth, 2014 (English traslation 2020)
Listening: “I Wanna Be A Cowboy, Baby!” - CMAT, 2020
Watching: “Avatar: The Last Airbender” - Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, Aaron Ehasz, 2005 - 2008
If you ask me, the music biopic genre was killed stone dead by Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and anything since has been a shambling husk, with the exception of 2014’s sweet and sad Love and Mercy.
This detail, like much else, is taken from Ronald D. Cohen’s Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival. Published in 2015, it’s a great real life companion to the film, and full of gorgeous rare photos. Cohen dedicates the book to Israel “Izzy” Young, a legendary figure in Greenwich Village folk music circles who must surely have had a double in an early draft of the script.
Dylan’s real name was Robert Zimmerman, and he used to tell people he ran away to the circus as a child. Apparently he was very believable.
Behan was extremely unhappy about this, understandably. The Patriot Game also caused a rift between him and Liam Clancy, who sang the song minus the bits critical of Éamon de Valera.
Quoted in No Direction Home, p.124-125