Woody Allen has remade A Streetcar Named Desire, with Cate Blanchett as Blanche Dubois and Bobby Cannavale as Stanley Kowalski. We find Blanchett, the wife of a Bernie Madoff type (Alec Baldwin), teetering on the edge, having escaped her precipitous fall in New York high society and a resultant breakdown to San Francisco, where her working class sister (Sally Hawkins) lives close to the bone with her two boys. Jasmine sweeps in with an air of condescension, driving a wedge between Hawkins and her rough-edged boyfriend, Cannavale. She comes close to regaining her stature, but her facade soon cracks, with calamitous results.

Blanchett is a lock for best actress. She is at once capricious and deluded, but her pluck is evident, and you find yourself rooting for her to regain a status that was both false and too easily won in the first place. The rest of the cast is excellent, especially Hawkins as the insecure but sweet sister swept up in Jasmine’s fantasies. But also, improbably, Andrew Dice Clay as Hawkins’ embittered ex-husband, his meager fortune having been lost by Jasmine and her crook of a husband.

This is a peculiar Allen film, with few laughs and only a couple of sentimental moments, defined more by a sense of dread as Jasmine keeps picking herself up off the canvas only to suffer another blow, more often than not self-inflicted. Ostensibly a meditation on the pretense of class, and to some dim reviewers, an indictment of Wall Street excess, this is really a film about the fine line between self maintenance and insanity. The movie’s weakness lies in its ambivalence as to what it wants to be, which results in atonality and an awkward and pitiless conclusion.

Melancholy, compelling and lyrical, one of the best films of the year, whether you like folk music or not.

Davis, a folk singer in 1961 New York City, is in crisis, his aspirations undermined by his uncomfortable and unwilling status as a solo act, a less than capable manager, and his own selfishness. The film is his journey to the realization that it is not to be (not that he lacks talent) just at the advent of Dylan. As club owner F. Murray Abraham tells him after an audition that is heartfelt, impressive and inapt, “I don’t see a lot of money here.” Davis made his way to Abraham via a harrowing trip to Chicago where he not only abandons something he has come to love, but may well have killed it. During the trip, he is harangued by a junkie jazz musician (John Goodman) whose takedown of folk as elemental is just another dagger in Davis’s ambition. Soon, Davis becomes too weary to pretend he can be successful, to flop on yet another couch, or to play local celebrity for well-meaning patrons on the upper West side.

The Coen brothers possess an attention to detail that serves the film exceedingly well. Their depiction of 1961 Greenwich Village and the folk scene feels just right, and the travails of Davis, a local Simon who has split with his Garfunkel and become more gritty, take the viewer back in time. Like David Chase’s Not Fade Away, the milieu is drab, smoky and intimate, and the music is at the forefront, but nostalgia is replaced by an elegiac feel and the Coen brothers’ signature dark humor. This is not a film about an unheralded legend, or something as corny as Chase’s paen to rock, but about art as work.

As for Davis, Oscar Isaac is anything but a character you champion. But he can sing and play and he embodies the sadness of having just enough talent. He is also loosely based on a real folkie, Dave Van Ronk.

If there is a weakness, it is Carey Mulligan as Davis’s bitter lover. She is so angry and one-note you feel pity for Davis when you should not. As she gets older, Mulligan is also strangely morphing into a replica of Katie Holmes.

In the first ten minutes, you realize this is going to be a melange of a Woody Allen black-and-white paen to New York and Lena Dunham’s HBO sensation Girls. Dunham’s show is an entertaining but often frustrating characterization of four girls, post-college, making their way in the world of New York City via witty, self-satisfied rejoinders and copious infusions of cash from their parents. Loaded with self-esteem but no brightly discernible skill, Dunham’s quartet negotiate the shoals of a hip, ever-changing landscape while coming to the realization that every girl with a B.A. from Oberlin is not destined to be a smash in the literary and art worlds. It’s hard to like her characters, especially, Dunham herself, whose Hannah is so grotesque, self-involved and deluded that you’re often left cringing or sputtering in amazement. Or, at almost 50 years of age and closest in sensibility to her poor beleaguered parents on the show, I am.

Still, Girls is a solid work, surprisingly addictive, and it always elicits a great discussion that can range from generational rot to what the cool kids are into these days. I also credit Dunham with either knowingly or unknowingly crafting a sharp indictment of extended, subsidized adolescence, and despite her ridiculous persona as her star ascends, I think she knows it. Or she should.

If Girls were a quintet, the protagonist of Frances Ha, Greta Gerwig, would play the mopey, co-dependent would-be dancer. Unfortunately, Frances is not in the hands of Dunham, who could effectively compensate for Frances’s pathetic existence with humor or humanism. Instead, she’s in the hands of a filmic sadist, Noah Baumbach, whose characters are often so vile and/or degraded that you wonder if the point of the exercise is solely to make the audience feel better about themselves. As the divorcing parents in Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels are positively toxic, as is Nicole Kidman’s abusive, miserable mother in Margot at the Wedding. Ben Stiller’s Greenberg is similarly noxious, though at least Baumbach offers some redemptive qualities near the end of that film.

The difference between those characters and Frances, however, is that they are in varying positions of power, whereas as a 27 year old Vassar grad who is as much a dancer as I am a power forward, Frances is at the mercy of her surroundings and singularly ill-equipped to handle them. You can feign amusement at her plight in the various uncomfortable situations Baumbach creates for her only so long before you feel guilty. Baumbach may have caught on to his excess, because in the last five minutes, Frances develops character, self-esteem and a place in this world for no apparent reason other than to avoid a mass suicide at the local cineplex.