OUT OF TIME

You're out of touch, my baby
My poor discarded baby
I said, baby, baby, baby, you're out of time - Mick Jagger/Keith Richards

The first time I watched the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), I saw it as a form of psychological horror movie, one that got at the heart of the self-sabotaging artist who believes himself to be both above his peers and yet also dismissive of the art form (folk music) he's so convinced he’s mastered. In many ways, it terrified me. Llewyn’s arrogant indifference and complacency results in his constantly being out of step, or even out of time (to use a musical analogy), with his era. When Bob Dylan appears at the end of the film to set the folk world alight with his debut gig at the Gaslight Café, Llewyn has no idea how much the times are about to change.

In some ways, one might say that Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) is similarly out of sync with the age he lives in as ’70s-dude Jeff Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) is in the 1990s in the Coens’ earlier, more broad comedy The Big Lebowski (1998). The barber, Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), in the Coens’ The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), plays a man so alien to his time that it could be reasoned, in one reading of the film, that the man is an actual alien himself. Llewyn and the Dude Lebowski are a little too flesh-and-blood for us to believe that about them. And yet, somewhere, I can imagine all these guys sharing a similar space and having a moment not dissimilar to the Spider-Man pointing-at-Spider-Man meme, in which similar types recognise themselves in one another.

"If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it's a folk song." - Llewyn Davis

Llewyn Davis is a child in a man's body, a kind of emotionally arrested Kasper Hauser.

Stubbornly refusing, in a Groucho Marx way, to fully belong to the scene he inhabits, and yet still expecting the world to fall at his feet because of his talent, Llewyn is a cautionary tale for all of us mired in the delusion that we’re remarkable when, in fact, we may be something far less than extraordinary or remotely generational in impact.

One of the reasons Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) works so well as a shadow twin to the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (2023) is that where everything seems to work out just fine for the 'Teflon' Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet) in that film, the opposite effect plays out for Llewyn. As his bitter ex-girlfriend, Jean (Carey Mulligan), who believes she may have been impregnated by him, says in an early scene from Inside Llewyn Davis: “Everything you touch turns to shit. You’re like King Midas’s idiot brother.”

It’s Llewyn’s resistance to belonging to anyone or anything—personally, socially, culturally—that makes him seem like an asshole to most he crosses paths with. And yet, having lost his musical partner in crime, Mike Timlin, before the film's story begins—the Simon to his Garfunkel—it’s also possible, for very human reasons, that he has become permanently afraid to get too close to anything for fear of losing it again. The vulnerability of the little boy inside him is well masked by the bitter and poison-tongued man he has become as a direct result of that loss. Grief takes many forms, and clearly for Llewyn, being a massive asshole is one of them.

Another tragedy for Llewyn is that he chooses to be an island in a culture that demands collective solidarity—i.e., the folk scene. Dylan wasn’t afraid to shake the shackles of that behemoth off his shoulders when he finally needed to, but Llewyn lacks the confidence to do the same; his belief in his own talent is not strong enough (or even justified) to support that tremendous leap of faith.

And where Dylan’s precocious, forward-looking talent allowed him to barrel past the daily trials of personal relationships and business dealings in order to manifest his destiny as the poet-singer of his generation, Llewyn finds himself constantly having to pay for his past indiscretions—financially, emotionally, and professionally like a gambler constantly in hock. As a metaphor for what folk was believed to be just before Dylan’s arrival, Llewyn is less an authentic representative of the tradition from which it derives and more a contrivance or cliché of the scene—a world away from the more rooted, Appalachian-style musicians who occasionally guest at the Gaslight and whom he mocks, leading to his final beating in the street by the husband of an elderly female folk singer whom he rudely heckles.

Llewyn is a man stuck, much like the stultifying folk scene itself, which by the post–World War II era had become a kind of cult. He is so myopically preoccupied with himself and the weight of his own circumstances that he has no way to move forward, let alone move the folk scene forward with him, unlike the character Dylan sings about in “Restless Farewell,” whose lyrics Llewyn might have done well to heed.

Only, by the time he took the time to listen, it would already be too late.

Oh, ev'ry girl that ever I've touched
I did not do it harmfully
And ev'ry girl that ever I've hurt
I did not do it knowin'ly
But to remain as friends
You need the time to make amends
And stay behind
And since my feet are now fast
And point away from the past
I'll bid farewell and be down the line

In the end, perhaps Llewyn’s biggest, most fatal mistake is his refusal to leave New York behind (one suspects he’ll still be playing the Gaslight for another few decades or so), as Dylan eventually did after his early years there. No matter how much he wails and protests throughout the movie, the city’s folk scene—particularly the Village—remains the closest thing he has to a home.

But he would surely do far better to be a rolling stone.