Hot Reels INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS

circa 1961, that would soon be transformed by Bob Dylan. Liewyn himself isn't a star; he's more of a grinder, a seif-sa botaging lourneyman, except when he actually sings and plays guitar, giving beautiful voice to the anguish and yearning inside him, a; it were. This is one of the film's many ironies: we can hear Liewyn's genius even if no one else can. Another is that, despite that genius-and the film's title-Llewyn remains fairly opaque when he's not in front of a mike. Go figure, which is possibly the point. Oscar Isaac, arguably best known for playing Prince John heCoen brothers' new movie, Inside Llewyn Davis, is of a piece with their earlier The Man Who Wasn't There and A Serious Man. All three feature central characters tortured in equal measure by fate and their own shortcomings-and ultimately, of course, by the Coens themselves. Those aren't everyone's favorite Coen brothers movies \ (though they happen to be mine), so maybe I should add that Inside Llewyn Davis is wonderful and haunting, one of the sharpest, most original portraits of an artist I've ever seen. Llewyn is a fictional Greenwich Village folk musician, a quasi-mainstay of a scene, opposite Russell Crowe in the most recent Robin Hood, is a revelation as Llewyn, while Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake, as an angel-voiced husband-and-wife duo, are amusingly earnest on-stage and amusingly career-minded off.

BRUCE HANDY