JOEL COEN AND ETHAN COEN
Inside Llewyn Davis
Llewyn Davis is not going to “make it”. In this case, making it is the music business and financial, or critical, success. He’s talented, to a point. But he’s also completely incapable of helping himself get ahead. He’s caustic and sardonic. He doesn’t connect with, well, anyone really. He isn’t a great showman or a great spectacle.
He’s a good singer, and a good guitar player, and he knows a bunch of great pre-Dylan folk songs. He exists in a moment in music, a breath really, just before his entire genre is swept into almost total cultural irrelevance by the coming of the singer-songwriter. He’s also not particularly business savvy.
It’s just not a good match. If any, or really most, of those things were different, he might be able to have a Utah Phillips style career as a sort living memory archivist. But he’s not that guy at all. He’s way, way too concerned with not appearing to be any kind of phony for one thing. The whole idea would seem completely ridiculous to him.
And yet. He says the same line at every one of his shows, and usually gets a laugh. The line is “if it was never new and it never gets old, it’s a folk song”. That’s not that far off from Phillips’ “the past didn’t go anywhere” and “folk songs are boring. But I am a folk singer, this is a folk music establishment, and you are, ostensibly, the folk.”
Llewyn could have had something. But he would have had to be a completely different person than he is.