Watch A Clip From Inside Llewyn Davis By The Coen Brothers

In 2005 Martin Scorsese put out a flic called No Direction Home, a documentary about Bob Dylan’s hard transition from acoustic to electric, starting in 1961, when everyone felt betrayed.

I thought that, or maybe Donald Brittain’s Ladies and Gentleman, Mr. Leonard Cohen— about Cohen returing to hometown Montreal from Greece, just as he’s gaining his fame as a musician— had to be the best picaresque tale about a folk musician facing the hardships that being a folk musician in the sixties presented. Now there’s this fictionalized account of Llewyn Davis, folk hero. And it’s Llewyn’s epyllion.

Inside Llewyn Davis is a week in the life of a folk musician as he tries to make it in Greenwich Village and life, in 1961. Watching the trailer, you see a throwback, Western kitsch style of film-making that the Coen brothers have built their style on. You feel, though, the clash this film invites with our current movie trend. It’s a folk tale, not an epic. A journey in a small space-time, that presents a different kind of community than the audiences of today are used to being presented with. The soundtrack concert for this film aimed to reproduce what ‘could happen around a campfire,’ and was held at the New York City Town Hall. The film looks to want to be what folk music is, but what does folk music mean today?

But that’s hearsay. Here’s the clip from the Coen brother’s Inside Llewyn Davis, in which Justin Timberlake’s character and Davis record a song together, asking Mr. Kennedy to p-p-please not send them into space.