A dark, damp, and dirty Greenwich Village alley. A man, a cigarette, defeat etched on his face. A shape emerges from the shadows and strikes him. The man collapses. It's the beginning of the film. And it is also its end. In this narrative Ouroboros, this existential Möbius strip that the Coen brothers weave with the precision of sadistic Fates, lies the very essence of "Inside Llewyn Davis". We are not watching a parable of success, nor a tale of redemption. We are trapped in a fragment of time, a week in the life of a man who, like Sisyphus, is condemned to push the boulder of his own talent up a hill of indifference, only to see it roll back down again.

Llewyn Davis, played by an Oscar Isaac whose performance is a symphony of sullen vulnerability, is a pure artist in a world that demands compromise. He is a folk singer gifted with a voice that seems to spring from the depths of the American earth, an ancient and sincere lament. But his talent is inseparable from his character: he is a charming parasite, an inveterate egotist, a walking-talking bad luck charm for anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path. He couch-surfs his way through the apartments of friends and acquaintances, leaving in his wake a trail of unwanted pregnancies, fractured friendships, and lost cats. The Coens, masters at portraying the common man crushed by cosmic or bureaucratic forces (from the modern-day Job of A Serious Man to the infernal artist of Barton Fink), here chisel their most painful archetype yet: the man who is the sole architect of his own failure. There is no divine plot, no briefcase full of money ending up in the wrong hands. There is only Llewyn, his guitar, and his almost pathological inability to make the right move.

The film is steeped in an almost spectral atmosphere, a perpetual winter of the soul that Bruno Delbonnel's desaturated, milky cinematography captures with a piercing beauty. The Greenwich Village of 1961 is not the romantic, bohemian hotbed of legend, but a gray, cold purgatory, a limbo populated by souls in waiting. Waiting for what? For success, for the cultural revolution, for Bob Dylan. Dylan’s shadow looms over the film like a fatal omen. Llewyn is the Moses of folk music, destined to see the Promised Land from afar but never to enter it. He is the precursor, the authentic and uncompromising talent on which someone else’s legend will be built—someone with better timing or perhaps, simply, a catchier name. The final scene, in which a young and still unknown Dylan takes the stage at the Gaslight Café immediately after Llewyn, is one of the most cruel and brilliant ellipses in the history of cinema. History is about to turn a corner, but our camera stays on Llewyn, in the alley, taking the punches we saw at the beginning. The world moves on; he does not.

The film's structure, loosely inspired by Dave Van Ronk's memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street, is less a plot and more a folk ballad itself: a series of verses and choruses that repeat with minor variations. The chorus is the search for a place to sleep. The verses are encounters with characters who represent the different paths Llewyn either refuses or fails to take. There’s the friendly couple, Jim and Jean (Justin Timberlake and Carey Mulligan), whose domesticated, commercially palatable version of folk is an affront to Llewyn’s artistic purity. There’s the road trip to Chicago, a disastrous and Beckettian anabasis to nowhere in the company of two almost mythological figures: a verbose, heroin-addicted jazzman, Roland Turner (a gargantuan John Goodman, a foul-mouthed Charon ferrying Llewyn to his own personal hell), and his laconic beatnik valet, Johnny Five. This is not Kerouac's epic of discovery; it is an odyssey in reverse, a journey not toward home, but toward the final confirmation of his own irrelevance.

And then there is the cat. Or rather, the cats. Named Ulysses, the feline belonging to his professor friends, which Llewyn loses and then desperately tries to find, is the most outlandish and metaphorically dense MacGuffin in the Coen filmography. It is a reluctant travel companion, a burden, a responsibility Llewyn doesn't know how to handle, just like his career or his relationships. It is the physical embodiment of his failed Odyssey. The brilliance lies in the subtly insinuated doubt that the cat Llewyn retrieves and carries all the way to Chicago is not the same one he lost. This seemingly minor detail transforms the journey from a quest into an even more profound exercise in futility. Llewyn torments himself for a surrogate, for an empty symbol, deceiving himself and others. In a Kafkaesque universe like the Coens', there is not even the solace of having corrected one's mistake. One simply corrects the wrong mistake.

The music, performed live on set by Oscar Isaac with staggering skill, is not a mere interlude, but the film's emotional and thematic core. Songs like "Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" or the heartbreaking "Fare Thee Well (Dink's Song)" are not commentaries on the story: they are the story. In Llewyn's performances, we see the artist he could be, the sensitive and melancholic soul that his abrasive character conceals. It is the only time his shell cracks and his truth emerges. But even here, success is a mockery. His only potential hit is "Please Mr. Kennedy," a demented novelty ditty that he himself despises, recorded for some quick cash and for which he signs away the rights, forfeiting his one, ironic, chance to cash in. It is the eternal dialectic between art and commerce, between integrity and survival, which the Coens stage with surgical precision and the blackest of humor.

"Inside Llewyn Davis" is an elegy. It is an ode to the artist who didn't make it, to the forgotten precursor, to pure talent that isn't enough. It is a portrait of a liminal historical moment, the one just before the great cultural explosion of the 1960s. Llewyn Davis is a ghost wandering through a world on the verge of being born, but one in which there will be no place for him. His story has no arc, only a circle. Every door that opens leads to a hallway that takes him back to where he started. There is no catharsis, no lesson learned. There is only the echo of a beautiful song lost in the New York winter cold and a man picking himself up from the alley dirt, ready to start his merry-go-round all over again. And as he walks away, we hear his voice in our heads: "Hang me, oh hang me... I've been all around this world." And we know, with a heart-breaking certainty, that he will keep going in circles forever.