O' Brothers, Where Art Thou?

"We tend to like characters that have a lot of abuse heaped on them.” Peering out from a winged armchair at a hotel in Soho, Joel Coen confirms something that fans of the Coen Brothers' work have long known. In a laconic drawl, Joel explains, “You can't help yourself. When you sit down and start writing a story you imagine characters. There are certain kinds of characters that you are interested in, or that just end up coming out and ending up on the page... and [Llewyn Davis is] a character who just keeps getting dumped on, for the whole movie.”

The Coen brothers' latest film, Inside Llewyn Davis, follows a week in the life of a folk singer in 1960s New York. Davis, played by Oscar Isaac, does a few gigs, sleeps on acquaintances' Greenwich Village sofas, and tries to get a break. His more successful friends look on, among them Justin Timberlake looking more beardy and earnest than you've ever seen him before, and Carey Mulligan as Davis's very pissed-off ex. Throw in a road trip with a folk-music-hating jazzbo played by John Goodman and Garrett Hedlund as the world's least friendly beatnik, and it's fair to say that we are not catching Davis on a good week. Or possibly a good year. Rigidly trying to keep his integrity while those around him tell him to sell out or give up, Davis' world looks more absurd by the minute.

Their protagonist may suck at it, but combining artistic originality and commercial success seems to come naturally to the Coen brothers. Trailing awards, their expansive filmography includes cult classics like Fargo, The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? alongside a host of crime capers, screwball romances and other experiments in genre. Oh yeah, and Inside Llewyn Davis has already won the Grand Prix at Cannes and received rave reviews.

Casting the lead actor turned out to be more challenging than the brothers expected, Ethan says. “It was awful! We started by seeing musicians, because we knew we wanted to sit down and watch somebody credibly and entertainingly perform a song. So we saw a bunch of musicians who were really interesting. We'd audition them doing a song, and then they'd do a scene, and that was always... deflating.” Both the brothers laugh, and Ethan deadpans, “Then we realised: what did we expect? We'd been doing this for 30 years, and actors, you know, they are actually very useful. So we started seeing actors, and Oscar just came in towards the end. Or, in fact, the end of the audition process, because it ended with him. And fortunately for us, he was great at both. If we hadn't [found Isaac] we'd have been screwed. But we blithely assumed that we would find the person, and, as it happened, we did.”

Many critics have singled out Isaac's performance for special praise. As well as acting, Isaac has to perform a number of entire songs direct to camera, and much of the plot hangs on these being credible. T-Bone Burnett, the film's executive music producer – who has made music with everyone from Elton John to Bob Dylan – says of Isaac: “I cannot think of a precedent in the history of civilisation for this performance.” So, that'd be quite good, then.

Which raises the question: if the music is that good, why isn't Davis more successful? Joel explains, “Here's the way we looked at it – it was very important to us that people not think that the reason he wasn't making it was because he wasn't good. We wanted to make a movie about someone where the reason he wasn't making it had to do with reasons other than the fact he wasn't good. Because everybody knows very talented people who aren't necessarily successful. And that's more interesting to us.”

Ethan, longer of hair and more animated than his brother, puts this in context: “Maybe in some sense [Davis] deserved to be doing better, or having more recognition, but there's also the fact that he's never going to achieve success at a certain level that people aren't even aware of in this world, which is represented by the character who shows up at the end of the movie. I mean, there's success, and then there's success. He's never going to have – or doesn't even aspire to...” Joel seamlessly completes his sentence: “...the success which is represented by the Dylan character at the end, who shows up. He's never going to be that guy.”

The film is set in 1961, a time when folk music hadn't made an impact on the charts, and the music Davis performs would have been deeply unfashionable. Ethan says, “People kind of know the Dylan folk era. But there was something right before that, a much smaller scene before anybody knew about it, before Bob Dylan showed up... We were just interested in the music of that period, as opposed to the more familiar music that came afterwards.” It was a time when the social movements which came to define the era were forming. Ethan sums up the scene: “Generally the folkies had contempt for the beatniks, and the beatniks had contempt for the folkies, and everyone had contempt for the squares, and contempt for the bluegrassers. Everybody had a cause. They were all kind of crusading in a way. More so than now.” He thinks about it and takes a U-turn. “Nah, not more so than now, [but] in a different way than now.”