The title figure of “Inside Llewyn Davis” is a schmuck Ulysses on an odyssey to nowhere: You might call his life an epic fail.
Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest film — textured, odd and curious, not eager to give up its meaning on a first viewing — is a bleak but lovely little parable about the failure of a Greenwich Village folk singer in the weeks before Bob Dylan hits town and Everything Changes. For Llewyn Davis, pretty much Nothing Ever Changes.
As played with tender vexation by Oscar Isaac, Llewyn is the kind of jerk who asks his fellow folkie Jim (an amiable Justin Timberlake) for a loan, which Llewyn intends to use to pay for the abortion sought by Jim’s girlfriend (Carey Mulligan, bitchy and fragile), whom Llewyn has gotten pregnant in a secret hookup.
Tiny things have a way of getting away from Llewyn: He has also lost track of a cat who bolted from another apartment where he was crashing. The cat’s name is Ulysses, which is the Coens’ clue that this film (like their “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”) has a few parallels to Homer.
But Llewyn’s life is more like an updated, shrunken version of the dire folk songs that the Coens and music producer T Bone Burnett sprinkle throughout the film. Llewyn lost a singing partner (in a dive off the George Washington Bridge, causing a dismissive jazz musician, played by John Goodman, to scoff, “You throw yourself off the Brooklyn Bridge, traditionally . . . what was he, a dumbbell?”) and has all but lost his aged father (who, at a retirement home, responds to Llewyn’s singing by emptying his bowels).
He’s also lost the license he needs to get back to his real job, in the merchant marine: Even Ulysses (the hero, not the cat) was at least able to make it as far as the sea. Oh, and Llewyn loses a big payout by signing away his backup credit on a one-shot record (a spot-on pastiche of novelty songs of the day called “Please Mr. Kennedy”). He’s his own pastiche of a folk song — neatly defined here as one that “was never new, and never gets old” — about a man of constant sorrow. But instead of being tormented by the hangman, he’s essentially tangled up in his own shoelaces.
Llewyn’s an unpleasant fellow, author of most of his own misfortunes, and yet it’s hard to be entirely cold to his several plights. He has musical talent. Just . . . not enough. For every Bob Dylan, there are a hundred Dave Van Ronks (the ’60s folkie who, in part, inspired Llewyn). He isn’t that special, and so he’s like most of us. Who would begrudge him his bitter one-liners? The Coens, so cutting to so many of their characters, are gentler with Llewyn, inviting us to wander and wonder along with him as he ponders why he must forever play the jerk.
It isn’t till the final moments of the film (which must be seen twice) that we realize we’re in “1961: A Circular Odyssey,” with Llewyn’s wan little epic limping around to the beginning again. Like a song that’s always been there, Llewyn is a forever presence, playing for tips, strumming beautiful misery, cursing in the shadows, waiting for the next opportunity to do nothing.