Of Signs and Singing

The film Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), the Coen Brothers's missive to the mid-century American folk revival, is not exactly of the loving variety. Our titular hero, Llewyn Davis, is capable of competent if not compelling performances of traditional ballads and blues, but he is also hip to the scene's hypocrisies: ‘If it was never new and it never gets old, then it's a folk song’, he says while finishing up a set at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village, halfheartedly genuflecting towards one of his community's peculiar understandings of authenticity. The night before, at the same venue, the flailing folk singer had launched insults at an earnest auto-harpist from out of town, an outburst for which he will now be punished by the performer's husband in an alley out back just as a young Bob Dylan takes the stage. (We can hear Dylan during the scene, singing his own song ‘Farewell’, as Llewyn crumbles to the ground.) ‘Where's your corncob pipe? Are you wearing gingham panties?’ Llewyn had yelled, drunk with sudden fury.

By the film's end, which is tragically also its beginning, it appears that, for now, poor Llewyn has taken to heart his encounter with the junkie jazzman he met en route to Chicago (masterfully played by John Goodman).