Inside Lewin Davis

The action takes place in February 1961. The main character, Lewin Davis (Oscar Isaac), is a former merchant marine sailor, and now a little-known folksinger who barely makes ends meet in the New York Greenwich Village area . His duet partner, Mike, committed suicide, and his recent solo album Inside Lewin Davis is not for sale, he has no housing - he sleeps on sofas with friends and acquaintances.

The film begins with a performance by Lewin at the Club. After the speech, the owner of the restaurant Pappi Corsicato, said that at the front door of Lewin, a “friend” was waiting. When Lewin comes out, someone in a suit and hat beats him, mocking and mocking his attempts to communicate with him ...

Lewin sleeps in the apartment of a couple of Gorfeynov - their older friends. When he leaves the next morning, their ginger cat runs out the door. Lewin manages to catch the cat, but the front door has already slammed shut. After unsuccessful attempts to attach a cat to the elevator and get through to Professor Horfein, Lewin takes the cat to the apartment of his friends Jim ( Justin Timberlake ) and Gene ( Carey Mulligan ), in addition, hoping to stay with them a couple of days. There he finds Jin, angry for the cat he had left in their apartment earlier, and went about his business, and met the musician Nelson, dressed in military uniform, a young man who is currently undergoing military service, and left army for only one speech, and in the morning is about to return to its unit. Nelson says he heard Lewin records and expresses his admiration. And Gene, in turn, reports that she is pregnant, and fearing that Lewin may be a father, asks him, ultimately, to pay for the abortion . In the evening, Lewin, Gene, Jim and Nelson all go to the Gaslight Club, where Nelson performs on stage. In response to the approving reaction of all friends and other listeners, Lewin reacts extremely coldly to the speech. This night he spends on the couch of Jim and Jean. In the morning, Lewin woke up from the munching breakfast of a soldier and began to speak rudely to him. Nelson, either because of a misunderstanding of what is happening, due to the nature of a simple person, or from respect for Lewin (talking to him “you”) does not react to Lewin’s aggressive attacks. The latter is trying to hint to Nelson that he is a weak musician, but Nelson replies that Bad Grossman from Chicago liked his game. Nelson adds that he once played at the club with Grossman and that he is a wonderful person who is ready to help anyone who is in a difficult situation, and then leaves. Next, Lewin opens the window, and the Horfein cat runs away again - this time it is not possible to catch him.

Lewin goes to her sister, from whom she learns that their parental home is in the process of sale, but all the money will go to treat her father. Sister offers Lewin to pick up the old things that she put in a box, preparing the house for sale. Among the things is a record of a song that Lewin recorded in childhood for his parents. But Lewin reacts coldly and tells his sister to throw everything away.

At the invitation of Jim, Lewin writes a comic song in the studio with Jim and Al Cody (Adam Driver) about how astronaut John Glenn does not want to fly into space and how he asks President Kennedy not to send him there. Needing money for Jean's abortion, Lewin agrees to a one-time payment of $ 200 in exchange for refusing any royalties in the future. After the recording, Lewin asked to visit Cody for a couple of days on his couch. In the gynecologist’s office, Lewin arranges for an abortion for Gene and discovers that there is no need to pay, because his previous girlfriend, whose abortion he had previously paid, decided to leave the child and move to Akron without telling him anything about his decision. Al Cody asks Lewin to leave before Tuesday, as he initially asked for a couple of days, and in addition, Cody's girlfriend arrives on Tuesday. When repairing a car, he wonders with Lewin if he wants to go to Chicago - his friends are going there, and you can save on gas together.

Gene invited Lewin to a cafe to discuss everything. She reproaches him for swimming with the flow, and in the absence of any life goals. At this moment he notices a red cat on the street, immediately runs out into the street and catches him. That evening he takes the cat to the Horfeyn. Initially, intending to simply give the cat away, he reluctantly agrees to stay for dinner, where he meets his family friends: a married couple and a musician playing old music. After dinner, the hosts ask him to sing for guests. Lewin reluctantly agrees and begins the song that he sang as part of a duet with Mike, but when Ms. Horfein tries to sing along in a second voice, Lewin explodes and utters rudeness. Ms. Horfein runs out of the table in tears, but soon returns with a cat, saying that this is not their cat, and in general this is not a cat, but a cat. Lewin takes the cat in dismay and leaves.

Lewin, in the company of two musicians, drives a car with a street cat in Chicago . His fellow travelers are the taciturn poet and hipster Johnny Five ( Garrett Hedlund ) and the odious jazz musician Roland Turner ( John Goodman ), who constantly taunts Lewin, cat and folk music. In a roadside restaurant, Roland falls into a stupor from an overdose of heroin . After the trio stops on the side of the highway to sleep for several hours. They are awakened by a policeman demanding to leave immediately. After a carelessly thrown phrase, the policeman explodes, Johnny starts arguing and the policeman eventually handcuffs him and takes him away. Left without keys in the car, with the cat and Turner disconnected, Lewin gets out of the car. Without thinking twice, he closes the car door, leaving a cat with Roland, who never came to his senses, and hitchhikes to Chicago. In Chicago, Lewin gets auditioned by producer Bad Grossman ( Farid Murray Abraham ). Grossman says that Lewin has no prospects as a solo artist, but offers to include him in the new trio , which he is now forming, if he agrees to shave his beard, change his image and go by the wayside. Lewin mentions Nelson, hinting that the latter, according to Grossman, has prospects, to which Grossman says that Nelson has contact with the audience, which Lewin does not have. Rejecting Grossman's offer to play the trio, Lewin is hitchhiking to New York. At night, Lewin drives the car while the owner is sleeping. Lewin sees a sign for the city of Akron , and he comes up with the idea of ​​visiting his ex-girlfriend, with now, probably, one and a half to two-year-old child. Looking at the city, he is distracted from driving and knocks down some kind of animal. He stops the car, gets out and sees blood on the bumper. After making sure that it didn’t seem to him, he searches for the animal and eventually sees a limping red cat. Perhaps this is the same cat that Lewin left in the car with Turner.

Returning to New York, Lewin decides to engage in music and tries to return to work in the merchant fleet. Going to Gene, where he wanted to temporarily leave his things, he tells her everything. And she, in turn, tells him that she agreed on his upcoming performance at the Gaslight Club, where Lewin will share the stage and the fee with someone else. Lewin still goes to the office of the merchant fleet, where he is forced to pay $ 148 of overdue membership dues to the sailors' union. When asked if his other documents were in order, in particular the sailor’s book, Lewin firmly answered positively. After he visits his sick father. Further, Lewin cannot find his sailor's book - the sister threw it out along with other old things, as Lewin asked at the last meeting. When he tries to restore the book, he is asked to pay another $ 85. An angry Lewin refuses to pay (he simply does not have money) and tries to return the $ 148 that he paid four hours ago, showing a receipt. They refuse him, because it was a payment of debt.

At the Gaslight Club, Pappi (the owner of the establishment) tells Lewin that he had sex with Gene (apparently, this is how she agreed with him, although it is possible that it was much earlier). Frustrated by this, Lewin cries out ridicule and boos a middle-aged woman performing for the first time in New York who simply cannot answer him in any way, and continues to play, ignoring him, though she is really nervous at the same time.

After Lewin goes to the apartment Gorfeinov, where they, not remembering the evil, warmly accept him. He is amazed to see that their cat, with the speaking name Odysseus , found his way home. There he meets another married couple: upon hearing his name, they recognize him as the performer of a comic song about the astronaut, which became popular.

The next day, Lewin performs in Gaslight. Pappi teases him about the previous evening, when he fell on the performer of folk music, and tells him that a "friend" is waiting outside. Leaving the cafe, Lewin glances at the young and then still unknown Bob Dylan , who enters the stage and begins to sing. When Lewin enters the alley through a service exit, someone in a suit and hat beats him up because Lewin booed his wife the previous evening.

The soundtrack mainly consists of compositions of the 60s . Justin Timberlake and husband Carey Mulligan, an English musician Marcus Mumford from the group Mumford & Sons ^[3] took part in the work on it. After the premiere, Timberlake explained how he managed to retrain as a folk artist:

Filming began in Queens on February 6, 2012, and was complicated by the early spring weather in New York , which contrasted with the atmosphere of a depressive winter running through the film.

The presentation of the Coen brothers ’new work at the Cannes Film Screening was“ just a feast for the hungry soul: the festival finally laughed loudly, listened to great music and received incomparable pleasure from communicating with unique talents, ”an observer of Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports in his report to Croisette " Valery Kichin ^[6] . At the same time, Kichin notes that “the directors failed to endure the entire odyssey in one breath: if the first half of the film plunges the audience into calf delight, then it gets lost in the second rhythm, humor liquefies, and the authors rush to finish and ring everything” ^[6] .

The world film press extremely positively accepted the tape, emphasizing that “Inside Lewin Davis” turned out to be richer and more interesting than the previous experience of the Cohen brothers in the musical genre - “ Oh, where are you, brother? ". Anton Dolin (" Gazeta.ru ") writes that the directors very successfully selected a name for their work ^[7] :

Moscow News journalist Yuri Gladilshchikov reports that “this is a film that so far has impressed the Cannes professional audience more than anyone else”, “he, as always with the Coens, is funny - in details, in nuances” ^[8] .

• “The center-forming element of the film is Mr. Isaac's phenomenal game . ” - Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal
• “Superbly Played, Amazingly Filmed, and Overall Exciting” - Claudia Puig, USA Today
• “One of the Coen Brothers' most layered, weird and powerful films” - Andrew O'Hehir, Salon

The film was included in many lists of the best film works of the year. Among those who included him in their top 10: the National Council of Film Critics of the USA , the American Institute of Motion Picture Arts , as well as full-time film critics Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly, Peter Travers and Owen Gleiberman, respectively.

• Official site
• Inside Lewin Davis on the Internet Movie Database  
• "Inside Lewin Davis" on the Rotten Tomatoes website
• “Inside Lewin Davis” on the Metacritic website