The life of university professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, right) falls apart in the Coen Brothers' black comedy A Serious Man. (Focus Features)

Nobody would call the Coen brothers sentimental fools. The sibling filmmakers, whose remarkable canon runs from Blood Simple (1984) to Fargo (1994) to last year’s multi-Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men, have always sought their laughter in the dark. So their brilliant new comedy, A Serious Man, comes as a surprise. While not exactly an upbeat tale – it’s about a physics prof whose world suddenly goes spinning out of orbit – the picture is disarmingly affectionate, even sweet. It’s also their most personal and, to use Joel Coen’s word, “Jew-y” film to date.

'[A Serious Man] was inspired by where we grew up just in terms of setting. There was a lot of pleasure for us in recreating that period.'

— Ethan Coen

A Serious Man is set in 1967 in a close-knit Jewish community in Minneapolis’s St. Louis Park, where Joel and Ethan Coen grew up. The man of the title is Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a solemn academic and paterfamilias whose life seems as simple and tidy as his bland, treeless suburb. Then Larry’s wife, Judith (Sari Lennick), abruptly drops a bombshell: she’s been getting cozy with local widower Sy Ableman (the priceless Fred Melamed) and she wants a divorce.

From there, things just get worse: Larry’s sad-sack brother Arthur (Richard Kind), an idiot savant with a suppurating cyst on his neck, starts getting arrested for gambling and sodomy. One of Larry’s failing students (David Kang) challenges his ethics by offering a substantial bribe in return for a passing grade. And as the icing on the babka, Danny (Aaron Wolff), Larry’s pot-smoking 13-year-old son, has been secretly ordering rock LPs from the Columbia Record Club and charging them to his dad’s name.

It’s tempting to read some autobiography into the screenplay, especially since the Coens’ father was also a professor (albeit, of economics) and Joel just happened to be 13 in 1967, too. But kid brother Ethan is quick to put the kibosh on that. “It’s all a made-up story,” he said during an interview at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, where the movie had its world premiere. “It was inspired by where we grew up just in terms of setting. There was a lot of pleasure for us in recreating that period.”

Indeed, it’s in the trappings of the mid-1960s Midwest — not the black farce of Larry’s dilemma — that the film glows with nostalgic affection. F-Troop flickers on the fuzzy black-and-white television (whose rooftop aerial Larry can never properly adjust). The psychedelic rock of Jefferson Airplane blasts from Danny’s transistor radio. The Coens even have a grotesque fondness for the strange machine Arthur uses to drain his cyst. (Its nearest equivalent in the Coen oeuvre is that iron lung in The Big Lebowski.)

Filmmakers Ethan, left, and Joel Coen. (Max Morse/Reuters)

Then there are those wonderfully “Jew-y” characters, from Sy, a bearded bully who purrs like a pussycat, to the trio of hilariously ineffectual rabbis that Larry consults in his time of crisis. They seem all the more authentic for being played by actors largely unknown to the movie-going audience. Only Kind and Adam Arkin, as a nebbish lawyer, are familiar faces. The outstanding Stuhlbarg, whose character rivals John Turturro’s Barton Fink in his mounting distress, is a Tony Award-nominated theatre actor with a skimpy film and TV resume.

A soft-spoken man who chooses his words carefully, Stuhlbarg says the Coens got to know him after he did a play workshop with Joel’s wife, actress Frances McDormand. “We became friendly and she invited Joel to come see me in the play.”

The actor, who performed Hamlet last year in New York’s Central Park, brings a tragic gravitas to Larry, as though he were a modern-day Job being tested by God. He describes his serious man in serious terms, as a cultural Jew discovering his religion for the first time. “I think his faith is awakened with the advent of hardship.”

If Stuhlbarg’s Larry is the film’s tragicomic hero, then Kind’s Arthur is its holy fool. A poor shlub who dabbles in sordid intrigues but retains a child-like naiveté, he almost steals the picture. “He’s the sentimental heart of the movie,” says Kind, known for his TV roles on Spin City and Mad About You. “I’m not patting myself on the back — I think [the Coens] wrote Arthur to give this story resonance.”

Working with the Coens for the first time, Kind found their directing style to be a mix of precision and playfulness. “They know exactly what they want before you even show up on the set,” he says. “And yet, when you’re on the set, it’s a collaborative effort. They will let you play. You can give them suggestions.”

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, left) has his hands full with troubled brother Arthur (Richard Kind, centre) in A Serious Man. (Focus Features/TIFF)

Asked if the movie, with its ridiculous rabbis (not to mention a stoned bar mitzvah scene), might be considered anti-Semitic by some viewers, Kind, who is Jewish, dismisses the idea. “There’s only one spot in the entire movie that I think is anti-Semitic,” he says wryly. “It’s when [the Gopniks] are all sitting down at the meal and slurping their soup. I know they put it in there for humour, but I go, ‘What did ya have to do that for?’”

More likely, the Coens will win kudos for embracing their roots, regardless of the gentle mockery. They even open the film with a faux Jewish folk tale, set in a 19th-century Polish shtetl and performed entirely in Yiddish. It seems intended to have relevance to the events that follow, but Joel says it’s only there because he and Ethan had been reading the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. “We thought it would be fun to begin the movie with our own version of a Yiddish story — without really understanding how or why it would relate. And quite frankly,” he adds, “we don’t understand now why or how it relates.”

Meanwhile, the Coens’ answer to any accusation of anti-Semitism can be found at the end of the movie — in a statement slyly tucked into the final credits: “No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture.”

A Serious Man opens on Oct. 16.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.