Clooney has already directed a few films.
Coens seem to pass off their less good material for others to direct. 
Suburbicon is maybe their worst material - I haven't seen The Hudsucker Proxy and The Ladykillers isn't theirs.
Or rather, it seems to be some sort of proto form of Coen script. They wrote it shortly after Blood Simple, and it clearly has a lot of their ideas they explore in later films, but it's only 3/5 of the way to being a finished product.
Clooney is a very competent director who's made a few quality films over the years, but this one was clumsily handled. It's not a good film. It's probably not a 26% on Rotten Tomatoes bad film, but it's not good.
It feels like Clooney is incredibly angry about what's going on in America right now, but has entirely failed to harness that anger into something productive. His mind appears to be distracted and diffused between dark comedy, absurdist Fargo-esque good crime gone bad caper and morality play about prejudice in America. You can see the effect he's trying to achieve, but he fails to pull the disparate elements together and ends up with a wildly uneven film with different bits - good and bad, that don't stick together. There's a racism "B" story here that seems to have very little to do with the "A" story. There are good, comic performances from great actors. There's a finely cultivated, nagging sense of unease that pervades, but it's overtaken by a much stronger sense that it's the emotional soundtrack to some well intentioned nonsense that palely imitates what better films have done before.
Still, it's not a total waste of time. It's been about 10 weeks since I saw it and there are some scenes that are still fresh in my mind - the comic scenes mostly. It's still a Coen brothers movie after all. I'd give it 2.5 stars out of 5, maybe 3 if I'm feeling extremely generous.
