The Coen Brothers “Do” Bob Dylan

THE LATEST TRAILER for Inside Llewyn Davis – the Joel & Ethan Cohen movie that fictionally rebuilds Bob Dylan’s early-’60s Greenwich Village folk scene – packs more of a punch than the previous two. That’s literally. The movie tracks the not-quite rise of the titular, somewhat schmucky folk singer, with tropes familiar from Bob Dylan’s biography. Justin Timberlake plays a fellow folk singer with strains of Dave Van Ronk and Richard Fariña, with Carey Mulligan (she’s-so-hot-right-now!) as his missus – a kind of Mimi/Joan Baez conflation.

MOJO’s friends at film bible Empire magazine (they’re literally the next door office) assure us that the full-length feature, due on general release in the UK at the end of the year, is topnotch, with musician-actor Oscar Isaac superb in the title role, informing Davis’s repertoire with echt musical spirit.

In the end it’s a tragi-funny study of error and failure, underlined with the late, stellar arrival of someone called “Bob Dylan”, played by Benjamin Pike (and you can see why).

The soundtrack, wrangled by T-Bone Burnett, features contemporary songs and new material in-the-style performed by Isaac, Mulligan, Timberlake, Marcus Mumford and the Punch Brothers, plus an unreleased studio version of Bob Dylan’s Farewell. That is, presumably a different version to that found on the Witmark Demos. The album is due on September 16.