‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’

On its own terms, Grant Gee’s Everybody Digs Bill Evans is an extraordinary film, fully deserving the accolades and awards coming its way. Adapted from Intermission, the 2013 novella by the Welsh writer Owen Martell, it concentrates on the months in 1961 following the car crash that took the life of the bassist Scott LaFaro, depriving Evans of his closest musical partner and throwing him into a a severe depression. The Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie delivers a finely drawn portrait of Evans’s sometimes mute anguish, compounded by his addiction to heroin and complex relationships with a lover and with his family.

Bringing the famous cover photo of Sunday at the Village Vanguard (the artist as ascetic, bespectacled intellectual) to life, his performance is fully supported by Valene Kane as Ellaine Schulz, Evans’s girlfriend, Barry Ward as his older brother, Katie McGrath as his sister-in-law, Bill Pullman as his father, and Laurie Metcalf,as his mother. All are superb, but Pullman and Ward are particularly adept at suggesting the mixture of concern, incomprehension and envy that makes this a compelling family drama.

Mark O’Halloran’s spare screenplay, Piers McGrail’s high-contrast black and white cinematography (erupting into saturated colour for sequences set in 1973 and 1979), the razor-sharp editing of Adam Biskupski and the wonderfully subtle score by Roger Goula are all of the highest quality, helping Gee to create as fine a cinematic depiction of a real-life jazz musician as I can remember. We get just enough of Evans’s music, in an opening sequence recreating the great trio — Evans, LaFaro and the drummer Paul Motian — playing a snatch of “Gloria’s Step” at the Village Vanguard in June 1961, to give those who don’t know the music a clear idea of what it was all about. The subtle use of archive footage artfully enhances the sense of period and place.

Although I’d recommend everyone to see it, and hope it achieves lasting recognition for the outstanding piece of work it is, I do have a lingering sense of disquiet. Is this actually the film that Bill Evans deserves? By concentrating on one harrowing episode of his life, certainly a legitimate subject for a novella, will it unfairly distort an appreciation of his place in the world? It’s a bit like reading Martell’s book without first having first read How My Heart Sings, Peter Pettinger’s definitive biography of Evans, published in 1998. Looking at the full arc of Evans’s career, there are questions that remain open. But Gee’s five-star film, so carefully focused and sensitively pitched, can really only be greeted with the warmest applause.

* The still from Everybody Digs Bill Evans shows Anders Danielsen Lie as Evans and Will Sach as Scott LaFaro. The film is in cinemas now.