Bill Evans was a boundary-breaking US pianist who contended with multiple personal tragedies, and a serious drug problem. This new drama about him will draw you to his hypnotic music.
While they may be a favourite of awards season, musician biopics have become an increasingly maligned genre, with their clichéd tropes – the sudden creative revelations, the tortured rise-and-fall-and-rise narrative arcs. The big problem – as with films about any type of artist, frankly – is: how do you really go about conveying and exploring their genius, ineffable as it may be?
This drama about tortured US jazz legend Bill Evans, played by Norway’s Anders Danielsen Lie (The Worst Person in the World), doesn’t entirely crack that conundrum, but it’s atmospheric, beautifully visualised and captures something powerful about the poisoned chalice of possessing exceptional creative talent.
Its Irish director Grant Gee is perhaps best known for his disorientating 1997 rockumentary Meeting People is Easy, which caught the band Radiohead at a low ebb as they travelled the world following the overwhelming success of their album Ok Computer. Everybody Digs Bill Evans is a more collected, composed piece of work, but no less frank.
Evans was a pianist known for his pioneering influence on the form, and in particular for how he revolutionised the jazz trio alongside bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian. The film opens vividly, by pitching the viewer into a New York club in 1961, where the threesome are performing: cutting between the musicians’ hands, lips, and eyes, the latter closed in quasi-orgasmic reverie, Piers McGrail’s gorgeous black-and-white cinematography is deeply, beguilingly sensual, to match their playing.
But before the credits have even finished, tragedy has struck – Scott dies in a car crash after falling asleep at the wheel. And from there, the film becomes a much starker, bleaker – and altogether less musical – affair. Evans deals with the emotional fallout – or not, as the case may be – by cancelling gigs, retreating into heroin use (cue familiar close-ups of bubbling spoons) and sleeping on the couch of his brother Harry (Barry Ward).
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