As much as any directors working today, the brothers Coen, Ethan and Joel, are unmistakable auteurs, filmmakers who place their own distinctive stamp on everything they do. 
 
 But while the bleak, funny, exquisitely made "Inside Llewyn Davis" echoes familiar themes and narrative journeys, it also goes its own way and becomes a singular experience, one of their best films. 
 
 Like the Coens' earlier "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," "Inside" sends a protagonist with links to Homer's Odyssey (here it's an ornery cat named Ulysses) on a drawn-out and difficult journey: Not for nothing is the film's production company called Long Strange Trip LLC. 
 
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 Both films have the wizardly T Bone Burnett as music producer, but because "Inside" is a celebration of folk singers in general and the bad-luck Llewyn Davis (beautifully played by Oscar Isaac) in particular, the songs here and the specific time period they come out of move from the soundtrack to center stage. 
 
 That would be the small and self-contained folk singing universe of New York's 1961 Greenwich Village, just before Bob Dylan's arrival turned everything upside down. As created by Jess Gonchor, the Coens' regular production designer, and shot by Bruno Delbonnel, this careful re-creation of a specific world is spectacularly right. 
 
 The same goes true for the Coens' admiring portrait of the psychology of this small but stubborn singing subculture, true believers in the purity of folk music who couldn't guess that they were, to borrow Marshall McLuhan's phrase, the opening wedge of the trial balloon. "We grew up with Bob Dylan, all those records were big deals," Ethan Coen explained at Cannes, where "Inside" won the Grand Jury Prize. "So what that came out of is a big deal for us as well." 
 
 It's a mark of how serious they are about this music and this era that the Coens mandated that "Inside's" songs are not heard in snatches on the soundtrack but sung out in their entirety on camera. Ballads thus beautifully recorded include folk music classics such as "Five Hundred Miles," "The Last Thing On My Mind" and "Green, Green Rocky Road" as well as less familiar but equally memorable tunes like "The Shoals of Herring" and "The Death of Queen Jane." 
 
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 All this singing placed a special burden on the sweet-voiced cast, which includes Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake, but especially on Juilliard-trained Isaac, who had to be both believable as a musician and a good enough actor to appear in every scene, a task so daunting the Coens despaired of finding anyone who could play the part until he walked in the door. 
 
 Placing its aesthetic cards on the table immediately, "Inside" opens with Davis, alone at the microphone in the Village's Gaslight Club, singing a full three-minute version of "I've Been All Around This World," a mournful tune often known by its chorus of "Hang me, oh hang me, I'll be dead and gone." It's a lyric that hints at the world of trouble ahead for this unaware young man. As Joel Coen admitted in Cannes, being one of the brothers' protagonists is "not for the weak of heart." 
 
 In addition to everything else, "Inside Llewyn Davis" is very much a roman à clef about those early folk years, with many of its characters inspired by real people the Coens reconstitute after viewing them through their very particular lens. 
 
 Ramblin' Jack Elliott becomes Al Cody (Adam Driver), the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem become unnamed Irish singers, complete with the requisite white Aran sweaters. And Davis himself is the Coens' version of Dave Van Ronk — his posthumous memoir, "The Mayor of MacDougal Street," was a key source — even though the men's physical presence and singing styles couldn't be more disparate. 
 
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 After his turn at the microphone, Davis has an unsettling encounter in the alley behind the club, a mysterious event not fully explained until the film's conclusion. Next we see him waking up on a bright New York morning, having crashed, as is his wont, on the Upper West Side couch of his friends the Gorfeins, Columbia University faculty with a weakness for the impecunious. 
 
 Davis, we soon understand, is going through a rough patch. He lost his singing partner to suicide and is trying to make it as a single artist, which prompts a fruitless visit to Mel Novikoff (named for a celebrated San Francisco exhibitor but modeled on Folkways Records' Moe Asch and nicely played by Jerry Grayson). 
 
 In addition to being in dire straits, Davis has the kind of acerbic personality that irritates everyone, his friends most of all. Fellow folk artist Jean (a deft Mulligan), married to singing partner Jim (Timberlake), is particularly furious at him, but, as we learn, she has her reasons. 
 
 With things looking bleak, Davis, almost on a whim, takes the opportunity to share gas money on a drive to Chicago with friends of friends. His companions on what turns into a further descent into hell are Roland Turner, a jazz musician who loathes folk music (John Goodman at his corrosive best) and laconic hipster actor Johnny Five (a spot-on Garrett Hedlund). 
 
 Though Davis clearly has the karma of someone who couldn't catch a break with both hands, "Inside" also reveals him to be a genuine artist willing to stoically suffer the cards dealt him if that's necessary to preserve his creative integrity. It's the film's empathy with him, its sympathy with the plight of artists in general, that makes "Inside" an unexpectedly emotional piece. 
 
 Llewyn Davis is a complex, contradictory character who sometimes does the worst things for the best reasons and comes alive most fully, most appealingly, only when he sings. It's a gift no one can take away from him, not even himself. 
 
 kenneth.turan@latimes.com 
 
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 'Inside Llewyn Davis' 
 
 MPAA rating: R for language, including some sexual references 
 
 Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes 
 
 Playing: The Landmark, West Los Angeles ||||| We cannot imagine Llewyn Davis happy. The self-defeating Sisyphus of the new film written, directed, and edited by Joel and Ethan Coen is the first person the viewer lays eyes on in the movie. Bearded, his unkempt hair falling in his eyes, he picks out some steely, blue notes on a guitar as he sings "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me," not to be confused with "Dang Me." "Wouldn't mind the hangin', except for layin' in the grave so long," he sings, with a good amount of sincerity. The time is 1961, the place is New York City, and the venue where Llewyn—portrayed with haunting conviction by Oscar Isaac, who, like everyone else in the cast, does his own singing and playing—is picking and not grinning is the Gaslight, a soon-to-be-legendary landmark in the "folk revival." 
 
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 Llewyn, as talented as he is, does not look to be one of that revival's future success stories. Why? For one thing, he's the protagonist of a Coen brothers movie. For another, after he finishes his song, the place's glib, slick, runty owner Pappi, directs Llewyn outside to see a "friend" who's been asking for him. Outside Llewyn finds no friend, but instead a suited, fedora-sporting stranger who exchanges a few words with the singer before calmly kicking and punching the daylights out of him. 
 
 And then Llewyn wakes up. And there's just the most adorable orange cat staring him in the face. 
 
 "Inside Llewyn Davis" is the most satisfyingly diabolical cinematic structure that the Coens have ever contrived, and that's just one reason that I suspect it may be their best movie yet. How Llewyn inadvertently inherits, loses, then re-finds, and kind of adopts, the aforementioned cat is one of the more involved traps of the movie's plot, which may make the wary viewer, or the all-around anti-Coenite, suspect that this is some kind of exercise in auteurial sadism, a charge the brothers themselves laid themselves open to when they admitted that in concocting 2009's great "A Serious Man" they thoroughly enjoyed torturing their lead character. 
 
 This movie—which can reasonably be described as feeling like a '70s Wim Wenders picture scripted by Billy Wilder and/or Preston Sturges from a story by Terry Southern—is different. Yes, Llewyn is an incorrigible screw-up, having, among other things, impregnated a friend who also happens to be the wife of another friend, two halves of the very palatable-to-the-mainstream female/male singing duo Jean and Jim (Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake). He's kind of hard to like, given his surly defensiveness. 
 
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 But this movie doesn't give the impression that he's someone his creators like to push around. Indeed, there's a sense of not-quite-grudging empathy going on here. There's a scene early on in which Llewyn's at the Gaslight watching a new act, a not-bad but pretty vanilla folkie named Troy Nelson (Stark Sands). Besides being an army guy, he's also taking up couch space at Llewyn's second-favorite crash pad. After his own song, Troy invites Jean and Jim up to sing with him, and they do a nice version of "Five Hundred Miles." Llewyn does his level best to enjoy them, but soon the audience starts singing along, and Llewyn furrows his brow a little and looks behind him with wordless incredulity. The place he thought he understood, the place he thought he was part of, is becoming alien to him. And he doesn't understand why. 
 
 Well, he understands why a little bit. Like all of his associates in the movie, Llewyn is mourning a loss, a loss that has made him a solo act, a solo act with a box of unsold records and no winter coat as the days grow darker and shorter The chip on his shoulder is part of his new defense (who knows, maybe it's not new; the movie is cannily selective about revealing its back story), but he still thinks he's got something to prove. After defiantly telling his sister that, no, he won't be going back to the Merchant Marine for a stint at sea, he impulsively joins—with cat in tow—a dyspeptic, shambling jazz musician and his doggerel-mumbling beatnik "valet" (John Goodman and Garrett Hedlund, respectively) on an ill-fated road trip to Chicago. It's a pilgrimage of sorts, to present himself to a reigning folk impresario played by F. Murray Abraham. Dryly noting the title of Llewyn's solo record, this man requests, "Play me something from 'Inside Llewyn Davis.'" And so Llewyn does. In both senses of the term. 
 
 It's a devastating scene in a movie full of devastating scenes. And full of quick, devastating observations. There's a whole movie in one shot of Llewyn's left foot, which he just inadvertently plunged into an ice puddle, slipping out of its loafer as he sits at a diner counter and tries in vain to squeeze the freezing cold out of his soaked sock. The beautiful, cloud-gray and autumn-leaf ocher cinematography by Bruno Delbonnel doesn't just cast a mood, it conjures a mode of existence. Moving, funny (but not frivolous; the characters never turn into cartoons), brilliant, it's a rib-sticking movie that represents a new high for its creators. ||||| That’s a controversial claim, when it comes to filmmakers who have carefully presented themselves as canny craftsmen (I’ve noticed that, in conversation, the Coens always say “movies,” and never “films”) and strenuously avoid aesthetic or theoretical lingo. But let’s back up to safer terrain, for now. I can say clearly that “Inside Llewyn Davis” is a shaggy-dog parable – actually, a shaggy-cat parable – about the troubled relationship between art and commerce, that’s loaded with colorful supporting characters and bits of hilarious business. Oh, and music. We haven’t even talked about music. In a year that includes both “20 Feet From Stardom” and “Muscle Shoals,” two of the best pop-music documentaries of recent memory, “Inside Llewyn Davis” still might be the music movie of 2013. 
 
 Indeed, “Inside Llewyn Davis” is in some ways a companion piece or incestuous sibling to the Coens’ 2000 “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Both movies seek to capture a crucial moment or turning point in the history of American popular music, both are collaborations between the Coens and songwriter-producer T Bone Burnett, and both – teeny spoiler! – contain explicit references to “The Odyssey.” (This movie, however, does not give Homer a screen credit, as “O Brother” did.) Isaac, whom you may have seen in “Robin Hood,” “Sucker Punch,” “Drive” or “W.E.,” finally gets his shot at a leading role and makes the most of it, as the sardonic and self-destructive title character, who is haunted by losses that are more alluded to than underlined. (While it’s true that “Inside Llewyn Davis” is less plot-driven than most Coen movies, it’s one of their subtlest screenplays.) Isaac sings and plays several traditional folk numbers live in the film, beginning with “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” in the very first scene. As the Coens both observed in my conversation with them, it’s amazing that they found an actor who was perfect for the role and also performs so beautifully, somehow conveying that Llewyn is a little too self-aware – or maybe self-aware in the wrong way – to make a living this way.
– The Coen brothers' latest film tells the dark tale of a folk musician in Greenwich Village in 1961. Though you might not want to befriend Llewyn, his story is well worth a watch—in fact, some critics are calling Inside Llewyn Davis a candidate for the Coens' best. A sampling of reviews: "While the bleak, funny, exquisitely made Inside Llewyn Davis echoes familiar themes and narrative journeys, it also goes its own way and becomes a singular experience, one of (the brothers') best films," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. Its "sympathy with the plight of artists in general" makes the film "an unexpectedly emotional piece." Andrew O'Hehir has "already heard from people who haven’t enjoyed this movie because they found couch-surfing, folk-purist, arrogant Llewyn too unpleasant a character to spend two hours in his company," he writes at Salon. But star Oscar Isaac offers "the year’s breakout performance," and the movie is "one of the Coens’ richest, strangest, and most potent." At RogerEbert.com, Glenn Kenny says the film has "the most satisfyingly diabolical cinematic structure that the Coens have ever contrived, and that's just one reason that I suspect it may be their best movie yet." It's "full of devastating scenes. And full of quick, devastating observations." Inside Llewyn Davis is as "enigmatic" as its lead character, writes Claudia Puig in USA Today. It's also "brilliantly acted, gorgeously shot and altogether captivating," offering "sly humor and a profound undercurrent of tragedy."