UPDATE: Carey Mulligan is apparently now set to play Inside Llewyn Davis' female lead. As is usually the case with the Coen Brothers, nobody yet knows what that role actually is. Apart from Mulligan and the Coens, presumably.
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We still know very little about the Coen Brothers' next project. What has just been revealed though, is that Oscar Isaac has nabbed the lead in the enigmatic **Inside Llewyn Davis.
What that lead role actually might be remains to be seen. We might surmise from the title that Isaac will be playing Llewyn Davis, but at this stage, we don't know who Llewyn Davis is, and frankly, we wouldn't want to commit ourselves anyway. This is the Coens we're talking about.
What's emerged thus far is that the film is something to do with the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s, and is in some way loosely based around "mayor of McDougal Street" Dave Van Ronk, who was a coffee-shop mentor to musicians like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. Joel Coen has said there will be plenty of music in the film, "pretty much all perfrormed live, on a single instrument."
Is Llewyn Davis a fictionalised Van Ronk, or a made-up folkster hipster who'll encounter real figures from the film's time and environment, a bit like Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown?
We just don't know, but it's certainly good news for Isaac, who's having rather a good year, what with Drive and The Bourne Legacy (there's also been Madonna's W. E. but let's not go there). He also got name-checked recently by Paddy Considine as one to watch. Inside Llewyn Davis is produced by Scott Rudin and part-financed by Studio Canal, and shooting starts in New York early next year.