“Everything you touch turns to SHIT. You're like King Midas' idiot brother!” shouts Jean (Carey Mulligan – The Great Gatsby), frustrated to the point of distraction. And where the folk singer hapless Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac - Balibo) is concerned, she's mostly right - everything he touches inevitably turns slushy and brown, and Jean is determined not to get caught in the mess. This melancholic comedy from the Cohen brothers (Fargo / No Country For Old Men) eschews their enthusiasm for guns and violence as it tips headlong into the world of folk music, circa 1960.

Motifs of loss abound (lovers, friends, cats) as the musician's life spirals beyond control on his quest to make it big in a musical genre whose time is quickly passing. “You've heard it all before,” says Davis from the get-go and he's certainly on the money although its legendary impresario Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham – Amadeus) who sums up the singer's life in six painfully easy words: “I see no money in this.” Davis is summarily dispatched.

The Cohen brothers have long enjoyed humour that borders on the cruel, and the spending time inside with Llewyn Davis is certainly that. His pitiful, penniless existence, the painful relationship with now successful Jean and her husband Jim (Justin Timberlake – Trouble With The Curve), the tortuous arrangement with his agent and the explosive showdown with patron Mitch (Ethan Phillips – Star Trek: Next Generation) place a close-up lens on his failing life. It's what the Cohen's do best, magnify fine detail to reflect their world view.

Inside Llewyn Davis finds them in fine form; there's not a beat, frame nor moment of this exquisitely crafted film that is unwarranted or out of place. As Davis, Oscar Isaac (Robin Hood) is terrific as an overstuffed sack that drops a trail of frustration and sadness wherever he goes. Endearing and irritating in equal measure, his character may not one of instant appeal, but it is certainly an unforgettable one.

This study of the struggling artist, the struggling human, doesn't have the cross-genre appeal of other Oscar hopefuls (Gravity and American Hustle among them). It's a little too astringent, a little too New York for that. But what it lacks in guns and glitz, it more than makes up for with mature, heart-felt emotion and the kind of heart-worn humour which only master craftsmen like the Cohen's could conceive.

// COLIN FRASER

Previewed at Cannes Film Festival on 21 May 2013