Greenwich Village, 1961. A folk singer who isn't quite good enough at his career to succeed and isn't quite good enough at anything else to quit.
New York, winter of 1961. Llewyn Davis is a folk singer playing the small Greenwich Village club circuit. His former duo partner has died. His solo record is not selling. He sleeps on couches. He picks up a cat by accident and the cat escapes. He fathers a child he didn't intend to with a friend's girlfriend.
The film follows Llewyn across approximately one week. He drives to Chicago to audition for a record executive. The audition does not go well. He returns to New York. The next day at the Gaslight Café, a young Bob Dylan takes the stage as Llewyn is being beaten up in the alley behind the club. The film closes on what may be the same week starting over.
Inside Llewyn Davis is structurally a circle. The film opens and closes with Llewyn singing 'Hang Me, Oh Hang Me' at the Gaslight Café, then being beaten up by a man whose wife he has heckled the night before. The events between the opening and closing scenes are, possibly, a flashback. Possibly the loop will repeat forever. The Coens have refused to clarify.
The film is interested in a particular kind of failure: an artist who is genuinely talented but not exceptional. Llewyn is good. He is not Bob Dylan. The film's quiet cruelty is that Dylan is two days away from being discovered at the same club Llewyn has just played, and Llewyn will spend the rest of his life knowing he was on the same stages as Dylan a week before everything broke open. Many viewers find the film unbearably bleak. Some viewers find it the Coens' most-honest film.
Inside Llewyn Davis is the film that established Oscar Isaac as a major lead. Isaac sings every Llewyn Davis performance live on camera — Hang Me Oh Hang Me, Fare Thee Well, The Death of Queen Jane, Five Hundred Miles. The performances are real takes, recorded on set, not mimed to a studio recording.
T Bone Burnett produced the music (as he had for the Coens' O Brother, Where Art Thou? in 2000). The soundtrack is one of the most-respected film-music compilations of the 2010s. The album outsold the film at retail.
Llewyn picks up a cat at the start of the film by accident — it's a friend's cat, locked out of an apartment. He carries the cat with him through several scenes. The cat escapes. He chases it. He finds what he thinks is the same cat. It turns out to be a different cat.
The cat is the film's quietest structural joke. Almost everything Llewyn does is the same: he thinks he's grasping the thing that matters, and he's actually carrying around something close but not quite the same. The cat is also a literal Schrödinger's cat — its identity is uncertain even to Llewyn. The Coens have confirmed in interviews that the cat is, in some sense, the film's organising metaphor.