Let's say it straight away: if you are expecting a Bill Evans biopic, you will inevitably be disappointed.
Everybody Digs Bill Evans does not unroll a life from childhood to final concert.
It does not tick the genre's boxes: the child prodigy, the rise, the fall, the redemption.
It does not explain, scene after scene, how a genius becomes a genius and then destroys himself.
Grant Gee's film is more ambitious than that.
It does not want us to watch Bill Evans.
It wants us inside his mind.
A Pianist Who No Longer Plays
The premise fits in a single line. Scott LaFaro, the trio's bassist, dies in a car crash. Bill Evans stops playing. The film settles into that silence, the silence of a musician deprived of his music, who drifts through New York and ends up taken back to his parents' home in Florida, like a teenager no one knows how to help anymore.
There is something disconcerting about a film on a pianist that begins by taking his piano away.
Yet it is an interesting choice, because what Grant Gee films is not the icon on the album covers.
It is the man once the music stops. What is left then: a tired body, an absent gaze, a ghostly presence among his own family.
Laurie Metcalf, as a mother who loves without knowing how, and Bill Pullman, as a talkative father who does the talking for two, bring a quiet, often funny, never heavy-handed humanity to this family chamber piece.
Barry Ward, as the older brother who comes to pull Bill back from the edge, may be the most touching of all, with his hidden mental illness.
The actors are spot on, every one of them. Nobody overplays the distress. Instead, everyone seems to play around it, as families do when they talk about everything except what matters.
A Memory That Improvises
The film does not follow a straight line. The present, shot in black and white, is constantly pierced by flashes of the future in saturated colour, as if lifted from a 1970s cop show. We move from one era to another without warning, like an improvisation that leaves the theme, drifts away, then returns.
These colour flashes are not mere jumps in time. They work like premonitions. In them we sense the years to come, darker ones, faces and places that do not yet exist for the Bill Evans of 1961. The film never comments on them. It lets them surface and vanish, like the musical phrases Evans would sketch without ever quite resolving them. The viewer does the rest. Those who know how his life went on will read in them a shadow drawing closer. Others will simply feel that danger is lurking, without being able to name it.
Either way, the effect is the same: the present turns fragile, and every moment of calm feels borrowed.
At first, we look for landmarks. Then we let go.
And that is where the film becomes intriguing.
It invites us to explore pieces of Bill Evans's life at random, guided by feeling and sensation.
Like volatile jazz notes that shine for an instant, iridescent, hallucinated, then fade away.
A family scene in the Florida sun.
A New York street at night.
A beloved face.
A gesture at the keyboard.
Nothing is ranked, nothing is explained.
Everything is lived.
Into the Void, No Explanations
One could fault the film for what it leaves unsaid. Why the drugs? What really happened between Bill and his brother? And with Ellaine, his partner? At times one would have liked to discover more. That frustration is real, and the film does not resolve it.
But it is also the price of a deliberate choice. The reasons behind the drug use are not what matters most.
A few leads can be sensed from a distance: grief, loneliness, an almost total indifference to his own body.
The film never turns them into a diagnosis. It does not psychologise. It does not judge.
Instead, it makes us feel this ethereal, cotton-wool existence, bound up with the drugs. Evans himself spoke of each fix as a "transfiguration", every day becoming "a whole life in miniature". The film seems built exactly that way: a string of small deaths and small rebirths.
This is where the experience becomes unsettling. By living inside his mind, we glimpse, in negative, the life he could have lived. The one his music promised, so light, so luminous. The one everything else prevented.
A Demystification of the Jazzman
The other merit of Everybody Digs Bill Evans is that it demystifies a figure jazz has often frozen in place. The doomed, brilliant, self-destructive musician is a cliché as old as the genre. Cinema has often fed it, from Clint Eastwood's Bird to Born to Be Blue, with Ethan Hawke as Chet Baker.
Grant Gee takes the opposite path. His Bill Evans is neither saint nor martyr, and even less a romantic hero of getting high. He is a humble, polite, almost shy man who is unwell and plays well. Who does not necessarily see a contradiction between the two.
There is no grand downfall scene, no breakdown filmed for an Oscar. The drugs are not spectacular. They are simply there, ordinary, daily, a fact of existence. That is more disturbing than any shock scene, and far more honest.
An Aesthetic in Tune With the Music
Grant Gee remains a great filmmaker of music. From Meeting People Is Easy on Radiohead to Joy Division, he has always known how to translate sound into images, with rare sensitivity. Here, you feel it in every shot.
The aesthetic is in symbiosis with Evans's music. Bare, almost abstract sets. A soft, unreal light, as if filtered through memory or through drugs, you can no longer quite tell. Frames that leave space around the characters, just as Evans's chords leave space between the notes. The film breathes to the rhythm of the music it celebrates: with restraint, with modesty, with that taste for silence that makes every note more precious.
A Film to Listen To
Not everything works. This floating structure sometimes leaves the viewer at the door and those unfamiliar with Bill Evans may walk out without really knowing who he was. The film demands a kind of surrender. You have to accept not understanding everything.
But for those who accept the deal, the experience is rare. You do not leave the theatre with a biography in your head.
You leave with a sensation, a colour, a few notes that keep ringing.
You have spent time inside a man's mind, with its flashes of light and its black holes.
And that is perhaps the truest way to pay tribute to a musician whose art lay entirely in what he chose not to play.
We do not always understand Bill Evans.
We listen to him and that is enough.