It has been three long years since a Coen brothers film graced the silver screen. Thankfully, the drought ends this month with the release of their sixteenth feature, Inside Llewyn Davis. The film follows a struggling singer-songwriter in the burgeoning New York folk scene of the early 1960s. Want to get the most out of the film as you possibly can? Try a few of these items available at the Library to give you a leg up on the guy rudely chomping away on a bucket of popcorn next to you.
Inside Llewyn Davis is based on The Mayor of MacDougal Street, the memoir of folk icon Dave Van Ronk. Sometimes the Coens play fast and loose with their source material, as they did in their Odyssey-esque O Brother, Where Art Thou?, or they make a more recognizable adaptation, as they did in No Country for Old Men and True Grit. We will have to wait and see how much of Van Ronk informs the fictional Davis.
Like O Brother before it, Inside Llewyn Davis is chock full of great American songs. The soundtrack for the film is already available for check out on compact disc, and digitally through hoopla. Need more music to fill your folk fix? Try Bob 
Dylan’s Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3 and No Direction Home; the latter contains a stellar version of “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song)”, a new rendition of which appears in Inside Llewyn Davis.
Lastly, if you’d rather avoid the aforementioned popcorn-chewing pest and wait for the film to reach the Library on DVD, kill time between now and then by getting caught up on all the other Coen classics. My favorite is 2001’s criminally underseen (or perhaps just undervalued) The Man Who Wasn’t There. Which is yours?
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