This movie's full name contains the subtitle 'Celebrating The Music Of Inside Llewyn Davis', the award winning but Oscar-snubbed Coen Brothers directed movie that came out here nearly four months ago, it's fair to say that this documentary certainly missed the opportunity to strike while the iron was hot. What's not fair to say is that this is even a proper documentary, more of a concert video sparsely interspersed by a few people talking, ninety percent of whom you'll most likely never have heard of before.
Starting off with someone telling us how great T-Bone Burnett is for organising this New York set concert, featuring folk songs from the movie as well as some from the early 1960s, but then we're never properly introduced to Burnett, never told who he is, why he organised this concert, and he is not once interviewed by the documentary's director.
Jumping back and forward between the rehearsals, the recordings of the songs in a studio, and the live-performances of stage, we do get to see some well-known faces to pop up, including Jack White, Joan Baez, Marcus Mumford and Llewyn Davis himself, Oscar Isaac. These are outnumbered by the number of artists that anyone unfamiliar with folk music will be completely unaware of, singing songs that they'll never have heard before.
There was an opportunity here to talk to the performers and lovers of folk music on what it is about the genre that they love, why it exploded in the 60s, and why it's quite considered quite niche now, and if there might be a resurgence thanks to the Coen Brothers film. Instead, there are a small number of very short conversations with the performers about who they are, and the film they're celebrating doesn't even get mentioned, with The Coen Brothers popping up for five seconds, without saying a word, and then promptly disappear again.
Even the performances themselves don't lend themselves particularly well to the big screen, as they are so small and intimate, the director realising this by spending most of the time on close-ups of the performers. Die-hard fans of the genre can add an extra star to the above score, but everyone else might be better served just listening to the Inside Llewyn Davis soundtrack at home.
