Everybody Digs Bill Evans

What happens when a great artist suddenly finds himself unable to make art? Music documentarian Grant Gee’s historically-grounded fictional debut, adapted from Owen Martell’s novel Intermission, takes us back to the months in 1961 after legendary bespectacled jazz pianist Bill Evans loses his closest musical collaborator, bassist Scott LaFaro, in a car crash—ten days after Evans’s trio recorded the landmark albums Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby. Shot in high-contrast, smoke-riddled black and white, with interjections from the end of Evans’ life in 1980 in saturated colour, Gee’s film looks at a withdrawn genius who has lost the desire and ability to play. Abandoned by his girlfriend, Evans surrounds himself with supportive family members who can barely understand him due to the combination of his crippling grief and his heroin addiction, whether his music teacher brother in New York or his retired parents who are living in Florida. As Evans, Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie frustrates those itching for any conventional psychology, giving a taciturn performance that rewardingly echoes Evans’s unique style of playing: apparently simple but rhythmically complex. (Mark Peranson)

Grant Gee: MEETING PEOPLE IS EASY (1998), THE BEST OF BLUR (2000), SONIC CINEMA: SPARKLEHORSE (2001), DON’T CRASH: THE DOCUMENTARY OF THE MAKING OF THE MOVIE OF THE BOOK OF THE RADIO SERIES OF ‘THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY’ (2005), GORILLAZ: DEMON DAYS LIVE AT THE MANCHESTER OPERA HOUSE (2006), JOY DIVISION (2007), PATIENCE (AFTER SEBALD) (2012), INNOCENCE OF MEMORIES (2015), JUDITH (2020), THE GOLD MACHINE (2022)