A glorified film school experiment with first-rate production values and featuring the best male performance so far this year, The Man Who Wasn’t There is nominally a pastiche. But like O Brother Where Art Thou?, the previous film by Joel and Ethan Coen, it goes a step – a small step – beyond mere imitation towards a broader fusion of nostalgias. Steeped in artifacts and atmosphere, The Man Who Wasn’t There is a period piece realized in the dominant cultural trends of that era, that is, the 1950s. And not just any 1950s. It’s the ‘50s of Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock, of newly built California suburbs, of acceptable ethnic slurs and the occasional UFO sighting. It’s a time and a place where a man like Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) could afford a nice little bungalow in Santa Rosa on a barber’s salary. It’s a time and a place that existed perhaps only in the movies. Above all, The Man Who Wasn’t There, like all of the Coen brother’s previous films, is a moviemaker’s movie, an exercise in technique, an etude. But Thornton’s performance with its unhurried, culminating force ultimately reaches a Bressonian transcendence.

Far from O Brother’s farcical muggings, The Man Who Wasn’t There projects a stone-faced sense of despair, much of it emanating from Crane, who narrates the action in a defeated drawl. As the title blatantly states, Crane is a nobody, a man rendered powerless by, well, everything it seems. Life overwhelms him, or rather, has numbed him to the point where he’s equally immune to pain and joy. His souse of a wife, Doris (Frances McDormand), is an accountant at a department store and is having an affair with her boss, Big Dave (James Gandolfini). This doesn’t seem to bother Crane. "It’s a free country," he gathers. By day, Crane is a barber, and he is a good one by all accounts, but as in his private life, he lives in the shadows of others, playing second fiddle to his brother-in-law and barbershop owner, Frank (Michael Badalucco). Ed doesn’t despair about his life. He simply despairs. Referring to the hair he cuts day in and day out, he intones, "It keeps on growing." Half-bored, half-mesmerized, Crane has been hypnotized by his own indifference.

Thornton’s performance is a tricky one. Disembodied, his voice floats in dense, foggy curls, much like the smoke from his cigarette which (in a telling period detail) is always lit and always in hand. Not quite a neo-noir anti-hero, Crane is existential in a walking-dead sort of way. His narration could have been lifted straight from Camus, and Thornton’s delivery achieves pitch-perfect melancholia. His performance, spare and minimal, is a melody in a minor key, one that echoes Beethoven’s "Moonlight Sonata," the piece that Crane hears one evening during a Christmas party and that is repeated several times throughout the movie as if Crane himself were churning it endlessly in his head. Crane is painfully skinny; a strong gust could disperse him. He seldom eats or drinks. In fact he might already be dead (as more than one critic has surmised).

When a sweaty, toupeed grifter (Jon Polito) blows into town touting a scheme he calls "dry cleaning," Crane sees it as his ticket out of Santa Rosa and out of misery. He agrees to fund the grifter and devises a scheme to anonymously blackmail Big Dave. The plan works, to Crane’s astonishment, and he suddenly finds himself in a position of power. But when things go wrong (and they always do in ‘50s noir), someone ends up dead and Doris mistakenly gets thrown in the slammer. Crane hires a big-shot attorney from Sacramento named Freddy Riedenschneider (Tony Shaloub) who immediately demands to be put up in the nicest suite in the nicest hotel in Santa Rosa. Riedenschneider is a prototypical Coen man-of-power whose maniacal self-love sucks up all the oxygen in the room. He’s a caricature and Shaloub plays him as one. In fact much of the cast seems to be in cartoon mode, willingly turning themselves into easy targets for the Coens' signature condescension. McDormand, miscast but still effective, is on hand mainly for comic relief. She has a funny scene in which she shows up drunk at an Italian-American wedding and loudly proclaims her hatred of Wops. It’s easy to see how this woman could contribute to Crane’s despondency. Relating a story about their courtship, Crane tells us that Doris proposed marriage after only a few weeks. "Don’t you want to get to know me?" he asks. Her reply: "Why? Does it get any better?"

While awaiting Doris’ trial, Crane gets entangled in a series of subplots, one involving a teenaged girl named Birdy Abundas (Scarlett Johannsen) whom Crane takes a paternal interest in, and another involving Big Dave’s wife who shows up at Crane’s door one evening with a story about UFO’s and a government cover-up. There are more twists and turns as well as another surprise death and before long Crane finds himself in Doris’ shoes, locked away, facing the electric chair. But the Coens don’t seem overly interested in where their story ends up; it’s the journey that matters to them, and like a scenic road trip in a Chevy convertible, The Man Who Wasn’t There is filled with vibrant local detail. Shot in black and white by Roger Deakins, the movie has a chameleon look that ranges from evocative Hitchcock to a stunning meta-Ed Wood. Watch for a fleeting but memorable shot of shaved hairs floating in warm, soapy water, first when Crane is shaving Doris’ legs, and then again much later on, when the razor has a more ominous meaning.

Thornton’s final scenes are sad, a little scary, and they ultimately rescue the movie from its built-in coldness. They’re a rare display of humanity from the Coen brothers whose reputation as adolescent technicians, or junior Kubrickians, seems to have paralyzed them into making movies that engage the mind and the funny bone but little else. The Man Who Wasn’t There is by no means a departure from their hyper-arranged, tightly choreographed style. But it does offer brief detours into warmer, more hospitable territory. Ed Crane might be their first fully human creation. By exempting him from their pervasive scorn, the Coen brothers have granted an act of mercy on a troubled ghost.

[rating: 3½ of 4 stars]