Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of Inside Llewyn Davis

Film (2013)

With The Avett Brothers, Joan Baez, Punch Brothers, Rhiannon Giddens, Oscar Isaac, The Milk Carton Kids, Colin Meloy, Marcus Mumford, David Rawlings, Patti Smith, Willie Watson, Gillian Welch, Jack White

This selection of folk musicians who had something to do with Inside Llewyn Davis, is out of this world. (The shortly forthcoming film, Inside Llewyn Davis, written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, is a fiction about a folk-singer in New York in the early 1960s, starring Oscar Isaac in the title role.)

This film is a documentary of sorts. Essentially, it is a concert film, including interviews with those musicians at rehearsal and around the time of the concert given at New York’s Town Hall in October of this year.

The playing and singing are superb, almost universally. Overseen by T-Bone Burnett, who appears as a guiding presence during the rehearsals, the performances all have a relaxed radiance that reflects not only the capacities of the individual performers, but, as well, the quality of the producers and the production itself.

In a way, Oscar Isaac, the star of Inside Llewyn Davis, forms the hub of the event, performing the signature songs that are featured in that film. In addition to being a good actor and a George Clooney-esque heart throb, he is an exceedingly good singer and guitarist. His rendition of Hang Me, O Hang Me has enormous delicacy and force of feeling. The timbre of his voice is compelling, a resonant tenor to which one can just keep listening.

Adam Driver, a funny and magnetic young actor who made his name as the bluntly ironic character Adam on HBO’s Girls, shows up in Inside Llewyn Davis and pitches in with Oscar Isaac in a funny rendition of Please Mr. Kennedy here. Driver is hilarious even when he sings.

The talented Punch Brothers seem omnipresent in the film, performing in various combinations and doing great work, memorably in their rendition of Tumbling Tumbleweeds.

Joan Baez showed up for this event and adds a warm connection to the past. As a remarkably well preserved seventy-something, her voice is not the intensely stirring soprano it once was, but she can still belt it out pretty well. Patti Smith, another old-timer who made her name some years later than Joan Baez, also pitches in.

The two members (Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan) of The Milk Carton Kids are a scream. In interviews, one almost thinks they are a comedy team; but then hearing them sing, one is startled by the refinement of their playing and their harmonized vocals.

For folk music lovers, this is a film not to be missed.

– BADMan