This includes spoilers for the film Inside Llewyn Davis, a movie that its co-writer and director Joel Coen once said “doesn’t really have a plot” so don’t worry too much if you haven’t seen it.
“If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song.” These are the first spoken words by Oscar Issac in Inside Llewyn Davis, the Joel and Ethan Coen masterpiece released in 2013, and their last perfect movie. They followed-up with the zany Hail, Caesar! and short film collection The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, both very good but not a punch to the solar plexus like Llewyn. Having just seen A Complete Unknown, which shares the setting of the folk revivalism scene of New York’s Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, it has been much on my mind.
The Coen Brothers are currently on their own making inferior work, Joel with the surprisingly dull The Tragedy of MacBeth and Ethan with the lightweight Drive-Away Dolls. It’s a little ironic, because much of Inside Llewyn Davis hinges on the titular character unable to find footing after he splits from his partner, the unseen Mikey Timlin, voiced by Marcus Mumford. (In the movie, Timlin is dead; in real life, Joel and Ethan just need to have a good meal this holiday season and work things out.)
Both Llewyn and Unknown begin specifically in 1961. The last scene of the Coen Brothers’s film (also the first scene, as it employs a record-stuck-in-a-groove gimmick) shows Llewyn Davis, the Job of folk music, at his absolute nadir, about to get ethered by a 20-year-old Dylan on the night that made him famous. Just as Davis is exiting the club, the Minnesota newcomer is spotted introducing his music to the crowd (and a critic from the New York Times). He takes the stage just after Davis’s “never new” comment. Dylan, of course, skyrocketed to success off the back of his own compositions.
Though the folk revivalism scene has a huge footprint in the culture, there haven’t been too many movies about it. Paul Mazursky’s Next Stop, Greenwich Village is set earlier (and it’s about actors, not singers) and Milos Forman’s Taking Off (to pull just one goodie out of a hat) is set later, focusing on plugged-in hippies. By which I mean it’s set in the counterculture rock world that Dylan helped invent when he “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, the climax of A Complete Unknown.
Inside Llewyn Davis’s unnamed Dylan easter egg sixty seconds before the credits roll is one of the few direct representations of someone from the scene in that movie. The closest other one is F. Murray Abraham’s Bud Grossman, who is basically representing Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager played by Dan Fogler in A Complete Unknown. The real Grossman actually ran the Gate of Horn club, where Abraham’s version serves Llewyn Davis the atomic diss “I don’t see a lot of money here” after Davis sings his brain out on “The Death of Queen Jane.” (Joan Baez, played by Monica Barbaro in A Complete Unknown, recorded the same song on her fifth album.)
The trio group Grossman pitches back to Davis is meant to be the real band Peter, Paul and Mary, who are seen in the wings of A Complete Unknown, and who hit paydirt by making the first substantial recordings of Dylan’s songs, easing his unusual voice onto the radio. Davis’s dismissal of the offer, like him waving away royalties to “Please Mr. Kennedy,” like him telling his sister to throw away his seaman’s license, like him not making the exit to Akron, like him not being more thoughtful to people in general, is one in a long list of poor decisions that doom him to wander the slushy streets of New York and Chicago in search of a couch and some kindness.
At first glimpse, Inside Llewyn Davis looked to be a biopic of the folk legend Dave Van Ronk, but that’s not really accurate. The commonalities are that Van Ronk, like Davis, spent some time in the Merchant Marine and that he released an album called Inside Dave Van Ronk. The copy of the album Inside Llewyn Davis within the movie Inside Llewyn Davis looks almost exactly the same—same font, some expression on the face of a guy hanging out in a doorway. The main difference is that Van Ronk’s cover has a cute cat poking its head out. That’s not on the cover seen in the movie—instead, the cat (or, more accurately, cats) are a major character in the film.
But Llewyn Davis isn’t Dave Van Ronk at all. Oscar Issac’s clear, soulful tone sounds nothing like Van Ronk’s gruff gravel, and by all accounts Van Ronk was a beloved figure (something of an avuncular one to young Dylan when he first came to town), and also a righteous man. Llewyn Davis gets decked on MacDougal Street by an angry husband in the movie. In 1969, Van Ronk was beaten by cops during the Stonewall Uprising, standing up for gay rights.
Though not named, the actor Michael Chernus plays a very Van Ronk-looking character early in A Complete Unknown, directing Timothée Chalamet’s young Dylan to the right address to meet the ailing Woody Guthrie. Dylan really did seek out Guthrie when he first came to New York, though the new film fudges some of the specifics. What’s important, though, is how so many of the old guard embraced the newcomer, letting him hop from couch to couch during his early days, much like Llewyn Davis does while wearing out his welcome in his later ones.
A funny moment in Inside Llewyn Davis, when he spies a piece of mail addressed to Albert Milgram (whom he knows as cowboy hat-wearing country singer Al Cody, played by Adam Driver), foreshadows the moment when Elle Fanning’s character Sylvia Russo (based on Dylan’s real life early girlfriend Suze Rotolo) sees a package meant for Robert Zimmerman, Dylan’s birth name.
That’s just about the only exact note sung in both films. But what’s remarkable about this unanticipated double feature is how they nail the specifics of the time—the locations, the clothing, the props, the vibe. (Not that I was personally alive back then, but I’ve read a lot about the period and lived in the area as a college student closer in time to then than to now, if that makes any sense.)
Inside Llewyn Davis conquered social media with memes—Oscar Isaac and a cat will do that—but won no Academy Awards. It only got nominated for two, cinematography and sound mixing. Many awards soothsayers have Chalamet as a front runner for the 2025 Oscars, and he’s well deserving of the praise. It’ll be some extra slush in Llewyn Davis’s shoe if Bob Dylan eclipses him once more.
Jordan Hoffman is a writer and critic in New York City. His work also appears in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and the Times of Israel. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and tweets at @JHoffman about Phish and Star Trek.
The post ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ And ‘A Complete Unknown’ Capture The Upstart Greenwich Village Folk Music Scene Of The ‘60s From Differing Vantage Points appeared first on Decider.
