It is 1967, and physics Professor Larry Gopnik has some serious problems: A student is trying to bribe him. Someone has been sending denigrating letters about him to his tenure committee. His blundering brother won’t move out of his house. His neighbors may be anti-Semites. His son, weeks away from his bar mitzvah, is smoking marijuana. His wife wants a divorce.

And his real troubles have yet to begin.

A Serious Man, the new film by the Coen brothers, is a brilliant pitch-black comedy that is both hilarious and affecting, awkward and relatable. Coming straight from the heart of the Jewish experience, it is made accessible to all audiences through a spectacular mixture of human ethos, metaphysical questions and mathematical proofs.

The film, while immensely enjoyable, is most certainly not for everyone: It is a challenging and difficult work concerned with humanity and spirituality. “What does Hashem (the Jewish word referring to God) want from us?” it asks. How are we to behave even when He seems to be toying with us? How are we to act on His will if it is ambiguous? And if there are no answers, why would Hashem make us feel the questions in the first place? Most filmmakers wouldn’t dare attempt a film even considering these questions, but the Coens allow them to drive A Serious Man.

Characteristic of most of the Coens’ comedies, the film is quite funny, but only in a sort of cruelly ironic and completely unexpected way. All of the brothers’ eccentricities are here — slightly exaggerated characters, quirky dialogue, a certain coldness in narration — but there is a softness to this film that isn’t present in many of their others.

This is likely due to the fact that Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is one of the most sympathetic characters in the Coens’ canon. Stuhlbarg, a relatively unknown but Tony Award-nominated actor, turns in a performance that demands nothing less than an Oscar nomination. With the exception of Richard Kind, who plays the colorful yet wholly inept Uncle Arthur, the rest of the cast is filled with unheard-of actors; still, every single person in the film plays his or her part flawlessly and with complete believability.

Behind-the-scenes regulars for the Coen brothers include composer Carter Burwell, who has written one of the most sorrowful scores of the past few years, and cinematographer Roger Deakins, whose camerawork is both beautiful and subtly inventive.

A Serious Man is an outstanding film unlike any other released in the past few years. Some critics have found a relationship between the film and the Book of Job, and since the Coen brothers have admitted that the setting is based off of their childhood, many are also calling it the Coens’ most personal film. It manages to get into the head and stay there long after the powerful and ambiguous final scene, a lot like the Coens’ award-winning No Country for Old Men and early masterpiece Fargo.

Make no mistake: This new film from the most consistently offbeat filmmakers in American cinema is not only one of the year’s very best films, but also one of the Coens’ finest.

Reach reporter Robert Frankel at weekender@dailyuw.com.