The problem with us columnists is that we're prone to predictions.

I kick myself when I do it, but it's an urge that's hard to resist. The difficulty, though, with predicting things is that you're almost always wrong.

As I was at the end of last year when I confidently announced that 2014 would be the year of the folk revival. About the only thing I had right about that prediction was that it is indeed 2014.

It was, in hindsight, a pretty ropey call. After all, I was banking on the Coen brothers repeating a trick they pulled over a decade back. I forgot that the Coens are neither predictable or prone to repetition.

Backing up, in 2000, the mighty filmmaking brothers Joel and Ethan Coen created what seemed like another in their string of critically acclaimed, commercially ignored, wilfully eccentric films. Wilfully eccentric? Well, it was set in 1920's Mississippi, was named after an imaginary film - itself from an old black and white film directed by Hollywood legend Preston Sturges - and was loosely based on Homer's Odyssey.

Surprisingly, it was a breakthrough. O Brother, Where Art Thou? starred George Clooney and sparked a worldwide revival of acoustic Americana, boosting or relaunching the careers of Gillian Welch, Alison Kraus, Emmy Lou Harris and more than a few others. The soundtrack album sold in millions.

When at the end of last year the Coen brothers launched their latest (having, in between, won a Best Film Oscar amongst other accolades) it seemed to me like lighting was about to strike twice. Inside Llewyn Davis was a film set during the early sixties folk revival in New York's Greenwich Village. It featured folk singers left, right, front and centre and the music was co-ordinated (like Oh Brother...) by T Bone Burnett. Could a new-era folk boom be far behind?

Well, yes.

The folk boom didn't follow and now that Inside Llewyn Davis has been released on DVD and blu-ray (it didn't make it to cinemas in culturally-challenged Tauranga, despite their previous film being nominated for 10 Oscars) it's pretty easy to assess why not.

Inside Llewyn Davis is brilliant. It looks wonderful, it sounds wonderful and it has a story that works with clockwork precision. But it is a low-key melancholic film. Even the music is – for the most part – stately and sad. This is not the folk music of joyful carefree hoe-downs but the scholarly folk of serious people. Aside from one carefree novelty song (a delightful bit of work from Justin Timberlake) it's pretty dour stuff. One look at the film makes it clear that this would never inspire a mass movement, something tacitly acknowledged by the film's final musical reveal (I won't spoil it for you).

But it is music at one with the film's subject matter. And it is subject matter that will resonate with many a musician or artist: whether to follow or abandon your art. How long do you continue? When do you give up? And, if someone is good enough, why do they fail to 'make it” when others succeed?

These are universal questions for artists and the film examines them from many angles. We open with Llewyn singing a full song, live. It's really good. That's the point. Llewyn is that good, but he's the wrong person at the wrong time. Is it his attitude? Or is it something to do with 'authenticity”? The film plays with several levels of what it means to be 'authentic”: does Llewyn being a real merchant seaman make him more authentic than the Irish singers in their immaculate matching fisherman's jerseys?

One of the many – absolutely deadpan – jokes is that even when Llewyn wants to quit and go back to sea he can't. Fate transpires against him. Another, and maybe it's not a joke at all, is that everything we see, the whole folk scene, is about to be blown away and left behind by the man in the final scene. We are always at the whim of others. Like great comedy, perhaps the only secret is timing...

I can't recommend this film highly enough to musicians and artists, and everyone else for that matter. It's beautiful, sad, funny and, dare I say it, even profound.