When the Coen brothers went west

What links Georgia O’Keeffe, Jack London and a singing cowboy? Our critic finds out

One morning Tim Blake Nelson heard a knock at the door of his apartment in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was his neighbour Joel Coen, the elder of the two film-making brothers, clutching 20 pages of freshly typed script. Nelson had played the escaped convict Delmar O’Donnell in the Coens’ musical