George Clooney, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson as the three fugitives from a thirties chaingang.

o brother, where art thou?

The old stories are the best: that’s what the Coen brothers must have decided somewhere along the road to completing the screenplay for O Brother, Where Art Thou? It’s a title which might, given the Coens’ laconic sense of humour and the fact that, even in their 40s, they still work together, be self-referential. It might be, but it isn’t. What it does refer to is a version of Homer’s Odyssey, starting out in rural Mississippi in the thirties and ending up in (where else?) Ithaca - as in the New York State town that lies between Syracuse and the New Jersey border. Along the way, there are sirens singing on a rock in the Mississippi (they couldn’t find the right kind of rocks so, being the Coens, they had them built), John Goodman as Big Dan Teague, a one-eyed (Cyclops, geddit?) bible salesman, and an ex-wife called Penny (Holly Hunter), who is waiting for our hero - Ulysses Everett McGill, played by George Clooney - at the end of the road.

They’ve done Minnesota, they’ve done Arizona, they’ve done LA (twice). Now, with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the Coen brothers do the Deep South. The result, as Nick Roddick reports, is an updated version of Homer’s Odyssey with bluegrass music. Inevitable, really.

There’s also real-life thirties gangster Babyface Nelson, played by Michael Badalucco, who last worked for the Coens on Miller’s Crossing. And lots of bluegrass music. I’m not quite sure where bluegrass music and Babyface Nelson fit in with Homer but it doesn’t really matter. And the music - by legendary bluesman and producer T Bone Burnett, who put together the music for The Big Lebowski but actually composes here - ends up being pretty central to the film. “Early on,” says Ethan, “the issue of music began to inform our thinking about it, and that argued for a Southern setting. One other thing that conspired to make it Southern was the early idea of making the characters chain-gang refugees.” “The two things came together at the same time,” adds Joel. “It all coalesced around the idea of doing a relatively contemporary version of The Odyssey, but in this region and with bluegrass music.” Conversations with the Coens have a habit of going round in circles. Fortunately, however, their movies don’t. And O Brother, Where Art Thou? does so least of all: for one thing, Homer wouldn’t have stood for it. The whole idea of a story you told in parts, night after night, was that it involved a journey: Tuesday night you were here, Wednesday night there, Thursday night somewhere else, and so on.