Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor and family man, finds his once secure and rational existence threatened with existential, moral, and romantic crises. The devil, or dybbuk, is in the details, as the Coens balance philosophy and hilarity, chronicling Gopnik’s fateful trajectory. From an old-world shtetl to a mid-century Minneapolis suburb, from the Book of Job and the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer to Jefferson Airplane and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, from mystical to secular Judaism, A Serious Man ponders the limits of human agency, reason, faith, and the meaning of life in the face of an impassive, chaotic universe.