Inside Llewyn Davis Review

Much like Nebraska, the movie Inside Llewyn Davis has received a lot of Oscar buzz recently after having loads of success at various film festivals. Also, it hadn't shown up in theaters near me until I went home for Christmas break and found a theater that was playing both it and Nebraska. After I thoroughly enjoyed Nebraska, I became excited to see Inside Llewyn Davis. Unfortunately, though, Inside Llewyn Davis never seemed to take off for me. I kept waiting for something big and emotional to happen that warranted the high reviews, but it just never happened.

Inside Llewyn Davis is a take on the Folk music scene in the early 1960's. It follows title character Llewyn Davis, who is a fictional character that is based off the type of events that actually happened. The movie follows Llewyn Davis for a week. He was formerly in a duo, but his partner in that duo committed suicide, leaving Llewyn in somewhat of an emotional wreck. He is poor, his new solo album isn't selling, and he has no home, so is bumming off of various friends while he tries to get things in place. This seems like an interesting premise, but like I said, I kept waiting for something big and emotional to happen, but nothing did. We just followed Llewyn for a week while he bums off his friends, upsets nearly everyone, and loses all his money. There seemed to be no point to it. There were several funny scenes, like him chasing a cat he let get away and him getting constantly made fun of while in a car ride with John Goodman's character. But the overall story was boring to me.

Despite the story line of the movie being utterly boring and pointless, there was a couple of things that I really liked about this movie. The first thing is the music. Being that it is a movie about folk singers, there are a lot of times where they played their folk music, and that was really good. From what I hear, all the songs except for one were actually sung live in full length by the actors themselves in order to get a live performance feel. That right there is really cool. Also, the acting in the movie is perfectly fine. Oscar Isaac does great as Llewyn Davis, although if he gets an Oscar nomination I might be upset because others like Bruce Dern, Tom Hanks, Robert Redford, Forest Whitaker, and Hugh Jackman are much more deserving. In supporting roles, there was Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake, and John Goodman. Timberlake isn't in the movie for too long, but he gets to be part of two songs, both of which were excellent performances by him. Carey Mulligan was fantastic in the movie as Llewyn's mainly pissed-off friend. The actor who steals the show in my opinion, though, was John Goodman. His scenes were absolutely hilarious. If anyone deserves an Oscar nomination from this movie, it should be him for best supporting actor.

Overall, Inside Llewyn Davis is a movie that isn't worth your time. It has good acting, but a boring and pointless story. If anything, instead of watching this movie, you should look up the soundtrack of the movie and give it a listen. It is great. For good music and good acting, I will give Inside Llewyn Davis a 7 out of 10, but I will put the label of overrated and over-hyped on it.