Like Hudsucker Towers, beneath every Coen Brothers movie beats a mechanical heart. Not merely because of the recurring modernist preoccupations with loneliness and alienation (as Miller’s Crossing has it ‘Nobody knows anybody’). But because each film makes for a perfect little formal experiment, through the Coens’ trademark use of re-imagined genres, surreal visuals, and complex plotting – even the sub-plots have sub-plots.

Following on from last year’s O Brother Where Art Thou, which became the biggest-grossing Coens’ movie to date, their new film The Man Who Wasn’t There is aimed squarely at more hardcore Coens’ fans (the ones who prefer Hudsucker Proxy to Fargo). It also marks a return to the pastiche of hard-boiled classic crime writing which underlined the brothers’ debut Blood Simple. Like that film, The Man Who Wasn’t There is an elaborately plotted tale of crime and punishment. Set in 1949, the movie’s protagonist Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), is a hairdresser in a dead-end insignificant Northern Californian town. Life has hardly dealt Ed the best hand, but his wife Doris’s (Frances McDormand) cheating ways present Ed with a lucrative opportunity for blackmail. Soon, though, his duplicity goes pear-shaped as he unwittingly uncovers much darker secrets than mere infidelity.

This is, then, according to Joel Coen, a movie which “is heavily influenced by the work of James M. Cain. It’s his world, it’s his kind of story.” Ethan Coen adds: “It’s got a guy you’d call a schlub as the main hero. But when you think about it, Cain’s stories nearly always had as their heroes schlubs – losers, guys who were involved in rather dreary and banal existences – as the protagonist. Cain was interested in people’s workaday lives, and what they did for a living. He wrote about guys who worked as insurance salesmen or in banks or building bridges. We took that as a cue.”

Although the screenplay for The Man Who Wasn’t There was not completed until four years ago in Dublin, while Joel’s wife Frances McDormand was doing her bawdy interpretation of Blanche in the Gate Theatre production of A Streetcar Named Desire, the script existed in embryonic form since the Coens were filming their Capraesque screwball comedy The Hudsucker Proxy in 1994. During the shoot in North Carolina, the brothers came across what for them was an intriguing historical curiosity, as Joel recalls:

“We filmed a scene in a barber shop, and there was a poster on the wall showing all the different 1940s-style haircuts. It was a fixture on the set, and we were always looking at it, so we started thinking about the guy who actually did the haircuts, and the story began to take shape. We wrote the character of a barber as someone who was living in the late 1940s working in a barber shop which is owned by his wife’s brother. The guy, Ed Crane, isn’t satisfied with his life, but he doesn’t know how to change it. He’s sure that he doesn’t want to be cutting hair for ever. When he learned from a customer about a scheme to get rich by investing in dry cleaning, he’s intrigued. Then after he learns that his wife is having an affair with her married employer, the well-to-do owner of a department store, it sets in motion a chain of events that has tragic consequences for everyone involved, but it really evolves from the haircut poster.”

With respect to the film’s rather banal setting, Ethan claims: “Many crime stories take place in an underworld setting. They tell tales of small mean people doing nasty things to each other, and nobody walking away happy. That’s sort of what this film is about, and sort of not. It’s really about ordinary Middle American people who get into a situation that spirals out of control. The crime element here is sort of inadvertent. The hero sort of stumbles into it.”

To further evoke the world of James M. Cain, the Coens chose to shoot the film in black-and-white. However, in order to achieve greater variation, the film was first photographed on colour negative but then transferred. As to the reasons for this artistic decision, Joel remains his typically evasive self: “For a lot of intangible reasons that aren’t easy to explain, it seemed as if black-and-white was appropriate for this story. It’s a period movie and black-and-white helps with the feeling for the period. Black-and-white is evocative in ways for a story like this that colour photography isn’t. That it stands out these days as being unusual is unfortunate. I think it’s a shame that people don’t do more black-and-white movies, or that it’s not a natural choice you can make depending upon your subject matter. It’s a whole different kind of photography that nobody uses any more, and when you do, there’s a chance you can get stigmatised for doing it. It’s seen as being arty and it becomes an issue.”

As has become usual for the Coens’ work, the cast (which includes TV megastars James Sopranos Gandolfini and Michael The Practise Badalucco) is impeccable. No-one more so than Billy Bob Thornton, once again proving his worth as a character actor in a central role.

“Billy Bob Thornton is someone we like and have known casually for rather a long time,” says Joel. “He’s also one of these transforming actors who changes radically from part to part. That’s what we thought would be interesting. We were intrigued by what he would do with the role. The character of Ed Crane is very passive, he mostly reacts and that’s a very difficult thing for an actor to do. He’s mostly ruminating and reacting. The character has a lot of voice-over dialogue in the film but doesn’t have very many lives. So the role needed someone who could carry a movie that way, who could be passive without disappearing. I don’t think there are many people today who can do that, who have the same qualities that Billy Bob has.”

The Man Who Wasn’t There is released on December 28th