‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’ review: achingly cool love letter to a jazz great

For all the beautiful, respectable music they made, many of the 20th Century’s jazz greats led such dissolute lives that they made the stars of metal and rock look like buttoned-down accountants living behind white picket fences. In 1928, Sidney Bechet accidentally shot and wounded a woman during a gunfight with another musician. Billie Holiday’s run-ins with the law are the stuff of legend. And Bill Evans… well, that’s the subject of this suitably stylistic biopic. With his fiction feature debut, director Grant Gee (who made the acclaimed Radiohead documentary Meeting People Is Easy) immerses us in the life, love and all-consuming heroin habit of the supernaturally gifted pianist.

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Rendered mostly in black and white, the movie opens at legendary New York jazz club The Village Vanguard in 1961. Behind the piano, Evans (played by Personal Shopper’s Anders Danielsen Lie) glances up at bass player Scott LaFaro with a conspiratorial look of devotion – the kind usually reserved for a lover. In fact, the pair are musical soulmates, which Lie somehow conveys without dialogue. As the pair lock into a rhythm that one character accurately describes as “like a perfect conversation”, the scene is intercut with images from a terrible car crash. Finally, Gee lingers on the bass guitar on the back seat.

LaFaro’s death leaves Evans looking and feeling like an apparition; a man who is not quite there. It doesn’t help that his longtime partner Ellaine (Valene Kane) has left him, too. Evans ends up lodging with his brother, Harry (Barry Ward), who’s living a more traditional life with his wife (Katie McGrath) and seven-year-old daughter. By the time Bill’s nodding out at the kitchen table, it’s obvious that his addiction is not compatible with their cosy domesticity. And so he’s shipped out to Florida to stay with his blowhard father (Bill Pullman) and quietly unconventional mother (Laurie Metcalf), where he’ll go cold turkey and recuperate.

The scenes introducing the Evans’ Floridian home embody the film’s strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, they showcase cinematographer Piers McGrail’s extraordinary skill and ingenuity, given that the film was shot on a minuscule budget in West Cork, Ireland but improbably conveys the bone-bleached look of the American state. On the other, Evans’ parents’ bickering is stilted and melodramatic, betraying an unforgiving 20-day shooting schedule.

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In the end, though, Everybody Digs Bill Evans’ positive attributes vastly overshadow any negatives. Adapted from Owen Martell’s 2013 novel Intermission, the film is punctuated by three flash-forwards, which are all presented in colour and share a tragic theme. Throughout the movie, a number of characters are devoured by forces that seem bigger than themselves – be they love, addiction, jealousy or indeed talent. Yet this is no pity party: when Bill and his parents sit down with the ‘Sunday At The Village Vanguard’, one of two classic albums produced from the performance depicted in the opening scene, their sense of wonderment is palpable. It’s Evans’ genius, rather than his tragedy, that lingers long after the final frame of Gee’s utterly absorbing film.

Details

• Director: Grant Gee
• Starring: Anders Danielsen Lie, Valene Kane, Bill Pullman
• Release date: September 11 (in UK cinemas)