[3] He is a young, struggling folk singer trying to become more famous and financially successful after the flop of his debut album, Inside Llewyn Davis.

When creating the character of Llewyn Davis, Joel Coen summed up the idea as "suppose Dave Van Ronk gets beat up outside of Gerde's Folk City.

The Coen Brothers used "Van Ronk's posthumous memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street" as an influence for the screenplay and Llewyn Davis' journey.

"[5] In an interview with Rolling Stone, Isaac further noted, "Well, I knew that it was loosely based on Dave Van Ronk [and his memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street], and he was like a six-foot-five, 250 pound Swede.

He also describes being influenced by Erik Franzen, an old friend of Dave Van Ronk's, who Isaac says "started teaching me this Travis-style picking, which I was not aware of—didn't know how to do it.

Isaac, described antithetically against his character as "a naturally warm personality", said that he prepared for the role by simply approaching random strangers at parties and talking to them, without trying to impress them or putting on a friendly facade.

In this way, he's an excellent role model for millennials: a guy with talent and an independent spirit, broke but not yet broken, cynical as all hell but still doing what he loves anyway.

When he visits Chicago to play for the powerful manager Bud Grossman (F. Murray Abraham), the latter tells him "I don't see a lot of money here" and implicitly compares him to a genial G.I.-turned-musician: "He connects with people."

However, Sam Adams of Indie Wire disagreed with this assertion, believing that Davis' sour and cold personality was the direct result of Mike Timlin (singing voice of Marcus Mumford)'s suicide.

After all, the worst tirade of his bad week by far is the sexist bile he spews at the most certifiably "authentic" musician we get to see: autoharp-strumming Elizabeth Hobby from Arkansas, played by Missouri-born modern folk performer Nancy Blake.

[2] The Coen Brothers distinguished the character from his source of inspiration, Dave Van Ronk, by casting an actor who had an entirely different singing voice and style of guitar playing.

The Coen Brothers felt that Llewyn Davis' sarcastic, acerbic, and unpleasant attitude was contradicted by his sweet, alluring singing voice, causing many people to question whether they should like the character or hate him.

"[14] Philip Pantuso of Esquire considers Davis to be a cyclical, Sisyphean type character, who has an ironic journey in which he is doomed to failure and doesn't know it; whereas the audience is in on the joke.

He notes that Davis' musicality is of utmost importance to him, and that he has a mission to maintain the authenticity that he ascribes to the village, which will ironically "desert Llewyn and all he stands for...following the trailblazing path of the famous Bob Dylan.

"[15] Oscar Isaac was praised for his portrayal of Llewyn Davis, and the character received universal acclaim from film critics.

[16] Reviewer Phillip Kemp writes, "Isaac, who proves to have a strong singing voice, performs the folksongs in perfect period style and succeeds in making Llewyn, for all his prickliness, an unexpectedly likeable, melancholic figure.

"[19][20] Calvin Wilson of the St. Louis Post Dispatch notes that "Isaac, who also shared the screen with Mulligan in Drive, may remind some moviegoers of the young Al Pacino.

The self-defeating Sisyphus of the new film written, directed, and edited by Joel and Ethan Coen is the first person the viewer lays eyes on in the movie.

The time is 1961, the place is New York City, and the venue where Llewyn—portrayed with haunting conviction by Oscar Isaac, who, like everyone else in the cast, does his own singing and playing—is picking and not grinning is the Gaslight, a soon-to-be-legendary landmark in the "folk revival.

"[23] Despite receiving universal acclaim from critics, Llewyn Davis was panned by those who experienced the Greenwich Village in the 1960s or knew Dave Van Ronk personally.

[24] Suzanne Vega, a folk singer who experienced the Greenwich Village of the 1970s and also befriended Van Ronk around the time said, "I feel they took a vibrant, crackling, competitive, romantic, communal, crazy, drunken, brawling scene and crumpled it into a slow brown sad movie".

[25] Van Ronk's ex-wife, Terri Thal, writes, "What bothers me is that the movie doesn't show those days, those people, that world.