Robert Christgau, who knows what the New York folk scene was like way back when has a great story about the new Cohen Brothers film, “Inside Llewyn Davis” that just went online. The piece is mostly about the authenticity of the film, and what that means.

Christgau writes:

“When you read about the scene you see this mania for authenticity,” says Joel Coen, describing what enticed him and his brother Ethan into making Inside Llewyn Davis, a film about folksingers in Greenwich Village just before Bob Dylan touched down and took off. But Coen isn’t really praising the folksingers’ authenticity — it’s their mania that fascinates him. In the very next sentence he goes on: “You have these guys like Elliott Adnopoz, the son of a neurosurgeon from Queens, calling himself Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. In the film we have a character who sings and plays a guitar, wears a cowboy hat and calls himself Al Cody. His real name is Arthur Milgram.”

For the rest of the story, head over to Rolling Stone.

— A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post —