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Over a long evening in June 1961, the Bill Evans Trio touched grace. But nothing (and everything) happens by accident. Forces ranging from the pulse of nightlife to postwar prosperity, from advances in portable recording technology to the perilous freedoms of narcotics brought three men to the basement of the Village Vanguard, where, wordlessly — and perhaps chemically — in sync, they captured the sublime on two LPs totaling just 80 minutes.
A jazz biopic played as a dirge, “Everybody Digs Bill Evans,” however, is less concerned with that fleeting liftoff than with the weeks, months, and years of pain that followed. Or, more to the point, director Grant Gee treats his 102 minutes of baroque ennui as the devil claiming his due. Shot in high-contrast black and white with obsessive attention to design, the film traces the unavoidable costs imposed on a family for the fleeting brush with artistic transcendence, however sporadic.
We open on that fateful night, watching Evans (Joachim Trier stalwart Anders Danielsen Lie) guide his trio to jazz glory while cutting to the car crash that would claim his bassist and closest collaborator, Scott LaFaro, just weeks later. From the first frame, Gee lays his cards on the table, employing funereal time jumps and go-for-broke aestheticization, signaled by an opening title perfectly framed to mirror a lit cigarette dangling from a woman’s lips, and only growing more acute from there.
Adapted from a 2014 novel and reimagined as a mid-century mood board, “Everybody Digs Bill Evans” lingers on the musician as his grief metastasizes into a personal and professional crisis, eventually engulfing his brother, parents, and wife, punctuated by bleak flashes forward that reveal the unhappy fates of nearly all involved. To his credit, the filmmaker handles this dark material with considerable showmanship, shifting from the most striking chiaroscuro black-and-white to bursts of near-garish technicolor, giving each grim coda a distinct visual texture. Yet, ironically, those visual flourishes — the plaid of a sportscoat, the myriad orange folds of a 1973 turtleneck — often prove more compelling than the drama itself.
That is partly by design, hewing to a structure that mirrors Evans’ own process of addiction and grief. At first, he is a clenched fist, wallowing in smack and uncertainty in the immediate wake of his friend’s death. Unable to find much support from his spouse, Ellaine (Valene Kane) — whose own addictions fuel their shared downward spiral — Evans moves in with his older brother, Harry (Barry Ward), a model of domestic calm, but one whose concern for his sibling is tangled with quiet jealousy.
Running counter to biopic convention, the film traces an artist in retreat, assuming Evans’ musical genius from the get-go and then building out a web of frustration — shared by the subject, his loved ones, and even the audience — when the jazzman finds himself unable to play. “I can’t watch you make nothing of something,” as Harry succinctly says. But the older bro can do little more than vent — hastening Bill’s trip down to Florida to dry out with their retired parents.
Over that first act, however, the film also resists much narrative or thematic momentum, unfolding in glimpses and vignettes meant to underscore inertia and to emphasize production design. But then, after a gruesome flash forward, we pick up along the sun coast where Bill Evans — and “Bill Evans” — perks back to life. While Danielsen Lie does fine work with a haunted-addict role not too far from his earlier, breakout turns, the Norwegian star rather fittingly finds a more interesting groove when put back into a trio alongside Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf as the musician’s working-class folks.
Without altering its register, “Everybody Digs Bill Evans” soon returns to the same notes of existential ennui, but with sharper thematic resonance. Loquacious Pa (Pullman) and reserved Ma (Metcalf) are equally unmoored, forever reminding themselves that their Florida retirement is a hard-earned reward after decades of blue-collar labor in New Jersey.
Yet each, in a different key, experiences the sunshine as a species of purgatory. Indeed, more than a manicured lawn or a set of gleaming golf clubs, their acclaimed son stands as the truest emblem of social mobility. For this Welsh immigrant family rose from nothing to produce an American icon who mastered a distinctly American art form — the ultimate apotheosis of the American Dream — and who is, ironically, the most miserable of them all.
Led by a Norwegian star and shot entirely in Ireland, “Everybody Digs Bill Evans” nevertheless most fully realizes a quintessentially American narrative. For a film about jazz, there is scarcely a person of color in sight — a likely byproduct of its production context, though one that casts the text in intriguing relief. This may be the first jazz biopic to unfold across so many (no doubt segregated) golf courses, but the racial dimension is embedded in the title itself. “Everybody” cuts both ways: it gestures toward Evans’ work with Miles Davis — and his rare acceptance within Black musical milieus — while also signaling how he could serve as a conduit to white America, paving a path that has been well-traveled ever since.
For all of his anguish, Bill Evans occupied a position of grace. None of that happened by accident, and all came with a tragic cost. To the film’s credit, it allows those contradictions and countervailing forces to linger — imperfectly and awkwardly at times, and later with full force. It’s a riff, played with real skill, lingering on dissonance rather than release. How fitting.
Grade: B-
“Everybody Digs Bill Evans” premiered at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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