Positively Main Street - Inside LLewyn Davis

I've been up and down on the Coen Brothers, so I approach each new release, despite the critical encomiums that always rain down on them, with a little trepidation. I wasn't, therefore, disappointed by Inside Llewyn Davis, but it didn't blow me away, either. I think the Coens do capture the look and mood of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 60s, although, like most directors, they have no idea how to make a NYC apartment look like "a dump." The main character played very well by Oscar Issac who actually sings the part very beautifully (not sure if he actually plays guitar as well - probably, though no doubt the music was over-dubbed). Some really fine scenes, including his audition before a gruff and brutally honest club-owner, the recording of the pop song (with Justin Timberlake - what  good actor he's become!), the fake Clancy Brothers (and a Young Bob) performing in the Gaslight, and a dinner at a Columbia profs house that ends in disarray, among others. The problem with the film, though, is that it's a story without an arc. Loosely based on Dave Van Ronk's memoirs (and it sometimes reminds me of that mockumentary about 1980s folks music - although in this case some of the songs that I thought were parodies were actually songs from the era, who knew?), it never comes clean as to whether Davis will have a singing career or not; it's a story told in a circular, roundabout narration, jumping backward in time and then coming back to its starting point; there's a not-subtle reference to Ulysses, a theme for an earlier Coen Bros movie, btw, yet the journey home does not particularly work as a metaphor here in that Davis does not return home but ends up where he began, at a crossroads, so to speak. I do appreciate that this is not a conventional biopic, and it's all the stronger for that, but on the other hand it does not particularly engage us in LD's fate - I found myself a lot of the time trying to figure out whom the characters are based on, if anyone. There are allusions to LD's back story - we see a little about his troubled relationship with his father, about the tragic death of his one-time singing partner - but these elements are not particularly integrated into the film - they may be relics from the Van Ronk memoir. Not sure why the CB's made "Jean," played by Carrie Mulligan, such a bitch - there are few enough good roles for women in this film, and none comes off well at all, which is unnecessary and probably unrealistic, if you've read other accounts of Dylan and other male folk singers given great strength and sustenance by the women in their lives. And there were some great female folk singers of the era, too, but they are absent here. The pluses - with the additional plus of a strong soundtrack, as in most CB films, to outweigh the negatives, but it's not the be-all, end-all story about folk. Maybe someone will buy the rights to Positively Fourth Street.