Anyone who’s ever had their musical ambitions crushed by the ever oppressive forces of real life will find a great sense of empathy within Joel and Ethan Coen‘s great reimagination of the Greenwich Village folk scene, Inside Llewyn Davis. Essentially a dour depiction of the limitations of artistic ambition and musical performance as a viable career, as well as a remarkable portrait of the Village on the cusp being redefined by the arrival of Bob Dylan and the commercialism of the genre, the film stands as a unique companion piece to Don’t Look Back and I’m Not There that pays tribute to what came before with the rye eye of the Coens.

As music producer T Bone Burnett has said, the Coen brothers might be the luckiest filmmakers in the universe, having somehow managed to find both a fantastic actor and a fine musician encapsulated within...