Dec. 5, 2013 1:04 p.m. ET
"Inside Llewyn Davis," which was written and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, begins with a three-minute song sung by the struggling folk singer of the title; he's played to perfection by Oscar Isaac. The setting is the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village in 1961, just before the folk-music scene was transformed by the arrival of Bob Dylan. Elegiac and stirring in equal measure, the song sets the dominant tone of this beautiful film, even if some of the plot's twists and turns are very funny. Llewyn, the wayward troubadour, is living out his own ballad of love and loss.
He would seem to be his own worst enemy, and he certainly can be an angry fool. Yet it isn't that simple, as we come to understand during a week of his life that threatens to go from bad to worse. Llewyn sings songs of death and dying partly because he loves them, but also because he has lost a musical soul mate who may well be irreplaceable. Dead broke and braving a New York winter without a coat, he crashes on couches in friends' apartments, and wears out his welcome in the process. His best friend's wife, Jean (Carey Mulligan), calls him King Midas's idiot brother.
Music has long been an important part of the Coen brothers' films; folk songs of an earlier era filled the sound track of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", their goof on Homer's "Odyssey." This time music is the story's heart and soul, and the trip is as much a pilgrimage as an odyssey by an artist who's unswervingly faithful to his art. Llewyn won't sell out by being frivolous, though he does earn a little money playing guitar in a recording session—the occasion is a cheerfully absurd novelty number by a zero-gravity group called the John Glenn Singers. ("Please Mr. Kennedy, I don't wanna go, please don't shoot me into outer space.") But cartons of his first solo album, which was a flop, have already been remaindered, and his working life can be summed up in a producer's eight-word response to a folk song that he sings with heartbreaking eloquence: "I don't see a lot of money here."
As an evocation of a seminal period in popular culture, the production is peerless; no feature film has ever explored the intersection of the folk movement and the Beat Generation with such fidelity to the spirit of the time. (T Bone Burnett was the film's music producer. Bruno Delbonnel was the cinematographer.) The script was inspired by "The Mayor of MacDougal Street," Dave Van Ronk's memoir about the music scene in Greenwich Village, and some of Llewyn's songs come from Mr. Van Ronk's repertoire, though the hero is essentially a fictional creation. Other musicians may be called to mind by the figures on screen: Peter, Paul and Mary; the Clancy Brothers; and, hauntingly, the young Dylan, whose curly haired presence can be seen in the Gaslight's spotlight toward the end.
The film's centerpiece is Mr. Isaac's phenomenal performance. He's an actor, first and foremost, who is also a musician, but you'd never know it from his self-effacing mastery; he looks, and sounds, to be a seasoned folk singer with an uncanny gift for naturalistic acting. Self-effacement characterizes the direction as a whole. There's none of the Coen brothers' trademark archness in the superb ensemble acting that, in addition to Ms. Mulligan, includes Justin Timberlake as a singer with overtones of Paul Clayton; Stark Sands as Troy Nelson, a stand-in for Tom Paxton; and F. Murray Abraham as a producer-manager so closely modeled on Albert Grossman that his name is Bud Grossman. During a road trip that Llewyn takes to Chicago, John Goodman does a deliciously gothic riff as Roland Turner, a pool hustler cum hipster musician who seems to be a drugged-out amalgam of Dr. John and the singer-songwriter Doc Potus.
Movies about musicians are often filled with angst, along with prohibited substances and booze, yet they usually manage to end on an upbeat. The outlook here is guarded. Llewyn doesn't drink, or do drugs, but his whole life is in danger of being remaindered. "Do you ever think about the future at all?" Jean asks with a withering scorn that's relieved by furtive tenderness. "You mean flying cars?" Llewyn replies wryly. "Hotels on the moon?" His future will stay uncertain until he finds a place of his own—in the world, as well as in the cold city.
'Out of the Furnace'
One of the many bright surprises of Scott Cooper's 2009 debut feature, "Crazy Heart," was how well the rookie filmmaker worked with actors. A near-indispensable step in the process is casting good actors to begin with, but the uniform excellence of the performances suggested a promising directorial sensibility. Mr. Cooper's second feature, which he wrote with Brad Ingelsby, makes good on that promise, and then some. The cast is, once again, extraordinary—Christian Bale, Casey Affleck and Woody Harrelson, along with Willem Dafoe, Sam Shepard, Zoe Saldana and Forest Whitaker—and these gifted people play their roles memorably. (Masanobu Takayanagi did the stunning cinematography.) But the film is as grim as it is impeccably crafted. I admired it ever more intensely until I realized I wasn't enjoying it so much as enduring its unremitting bleakness.
The story turns on two brothers, and two furnaces. Mr. Bale's Russell Baze works those of a mill in a Pennsylvania town where they're still making steel, though not for much longer; the time is 2008, and heavy industry has been moving to Asia. Mr. Affleck's Rodney Baze, Russell's younger brother, is back from the furnace of Iraq, and seethingly rageful; at one point he vents his rage in a scene of immense power. Mr. Harrelson's Harlan De Groat is evil incarnate, a terrifying brute who first appears in a violent preface—the level of violence in this film is exceedingly high—then reappears to blight the lives of both brothers.
Mr. Bale, ever the brilliantly inward performer, makes Russell sympathetic with small strokes—the tenderness he displays toward his girlfriend, Lena (Ms. Saldana), and toward his ailing father (Bingo O'Malley). Mr. Affleck is inward, too, and insufficiently appreciated because his work is never flashy; he uses his breathy voice and constrained affect to make us understand that Rodney, though in debt and adrift, will do anything to set himself a profitable course.
That's where Harlan De Groat comes in. He's the malign alpha male of what's referred to as a group of "inbreds from Jersey." (Much has been reported over the years about the existence, in the Ramapo mountains of northern New Jersey and southern New York, of just such a group, one of whose family names is, in fact, DeGroat.) When Rodney's money woes move him into the orbit of Harlan's crime ring, he soon disappears, and Russell, frustrated by police inaction, takes the law into his own hands. And that's where "Out of the Furnace" devolves from an electrifying character study into a disappointing tale of trackdown and revenge. It's not that Russell and Harlan aren't mesmerizing antagonists, or that the inevitable climax isn't elegantly staged. The disappointment lies in the inevitability. The outcome is no more or less than what we expect it to be, and that doesn't come close to enough.
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'One Trick Pony' (1980)
In a class by itself when it comes to melancholy accounts of musicians on the road. (Llewyn Davis suffers all the miseries of being on the road without actually going on a road tour.) Paul Simon's fictional folk singer, Jonah Levin, was big in the 1960s, but 20 years later he's struggling to make a new album and save his failing marriage. Melancholy or not, it's a terribly touching film and Mr. Simon is fine in a role that keeps him on screen throughout. Robert M. Young directed from Mr. Simon's original screenplay.
'Intolerable Cruelty' (2003)
Joel Coen directed this quick-witted comedy from a screenplay he wrote with Robert Ramsey, Matthew Stone and his brother, Ethan Coen. The first time we see George Clooney's hotshot divorce lawyer, it's by the eerie light of tooth-whitening equipment in a dentist's office. Miles Massey cares about his teeth. They're part of his panache in a glittering Los Angeles milieu of ambition and wealth, where teeth are razor-sharp and often bared. Catherine Zeta-Jones is Marylin, a gorgeous schemer who wants to take her filthy-rich husband—and Miles's woefully foolish client—to the cleaners.
'Gone Baby Gone' (2007)
Casey Affleck makes an improbable but plausible hero in this thriller about the search for a missing 4-year-old girl. He's Patrick Kenzie, a diffident private eye who turns out to be one smart sheep among underworld wolves. The film was directed by the star's older brother, Ben Affleck, whose behind-the-camera debut is not just plausible but admirable; he's expert with actors, pays attention to telling details and sustains a dark tone of pervasive evil. (John Toll's cinematography gives the darkness an alluring glint.) The cast includes Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman, Amy Ryan and Michelle Monaghan.
Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com
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