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There's a scene—one of several—from No Country for Old Men, the new Coen Brothers movie adapted from Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel, which will be obsessively taken apart and reassembled for years to come. A girl by a pool. Some beers. A proposition. Sure, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is married and, yes, his wife is on her way into town. But maybe he'll join this girl with her cold beers and big heart—so long as there's no horsing around. What happens next is intensely important and yet maddeningly vague. And it all happens off-screen.

With No Country about to arrive in theaters, Brolin is sitting by the pool at the Chateau Marmont. Soon he'll be driving out to the airport to pick up his wife, actress Diane Lane, who's been marooned on location in Toronto and North Carolina these past six months. But that's a few hours from now. He removes the you-lookin'-at-me? shades and kicks off his black Converse All Stars. "I'm so ecstatic to get to know my wife again," Brolin begins. "I just want to sit there and look at her." His big, suntanned hands in the air, he squeezes something soft and curvy from memory.

Neither of us is booked in at the Chateau. Truth is, we have sneaked out here—Brolin has never played it safe, so why start now? He lights up the first in a series of Winstons. "Young Nolte" is how the 39-year-old actor is presently known in Hollywood. Smug, sick, and twisted are becoming an on-screen sideline: A believably bisexual federal agent in David O. Russell's Flirting With Disaster. A self-satisfied dentist in Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda. A mad doctor in the Robert Rodriguez half of Grindhouse, a character who seems like he's on his fifteenth coffee and drunk at the same time. Even so, it's taken awhile to gain momentum with such blue-chip directors, and a year ago Brolin was forced to sell his farm in Northern California and become a serious day trader. "That's how I earn the majority of my money," he says, "so I don't have to do roles I don't want to." He doesn't usually tell people about his convoluted stock-picking system. "It's all about patterns. If you look at the graph after a while, all you see is fear and greed. All stocks are fear and greed. It's people."

But now, with his career overheating, he's shopping for a replacement farm. This fall, he'll costar as a corrupt cop with Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe in Ridley Scott's American Gangster. He shows up as a cop again in Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah. But first comes Llewelyn Moss, tripping over a heap of dead Mexicans and a suitcase padded with hundreds out in the Texas desert after a drug deal gone to hell. Llewelyn, for all his good intentions, finds himself being hunted by a creep named Chigurh—Javier Bardem as a flesh-and-blood Terminator with a ridiculous Monkees mop-top. Llewelyn's wife (Kelly Macdonald) and the sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones) worry after him as the chase jerks its way through sad, shag-carpeted motels.