Everybody Digs Bill Evans

The minor and major chords are played close together in this moving and beautifully shot and performed portrait of jazz’s legendary pianist, Bill Evans. Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie (Sentimental Value) tickles the ivories with a melancholy charm in a quiet and restrained performance. He looks album-cover cool, while at the same time drifting through a life marked with tragedy and addiction. 

We start with a stunning recreation of the live set at New York’s Village Vanguard which was to be issued as two landmark albums by the Evans trio. Only ten days later and shown in flash forward during the gig, bass player Scott LaFaro is killed when he falls asleep at the wheel of his car. Unable to perform, or even face the piano, Evans is first taken in by his brother, Harry (Barry Ward), who has his own mental health issues, and then his parents – played as an adorable double act by Laurie Metcalf and Bill Pullman – in Florida, where he kicks the junk. The pictured is clouded by girlfriend Ellaine (Valene Kane), a fellow junkie also trying to kick the habit, who circles warily. 

Anyone hoping for the usual music biopic beats that were so effectively dismantled by John C Reilly in Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story is going to be disappointed. Aside from the opening scene, there are relatively few moments of music in the film. The title of Owen Martell’s novel, ‘Intermission’, from which the film was adapted by Mark O’Halloran, is even more explicit. Evans’s mother says the silent part out loud when she says: ‘Sometimes the intermission is part of the music.’

Anders Danielsen Lie looks album-cover cool

Lie, who as well as an actor (fun fact) is a musician and a working GP in Oslo, plays Evans as someone curled up into himself like a treble clef. When he gets high, he’s nodding; when with other people, he’s alone. The only time he’s truly present is on stage when he can finally connect with his fellow performers. It’s telling that his group – the trio – is such a small nugget of musical creativity, as intimate as a family. Evans also played on the most commercially successful album of all time, Kind of Blue, with fellow geniuses Miles Davis and John Coltrane.    

Irish director Grant Gee gives the film a woozy, impressionistic feel. Piers McGrail’s predominantly black-and-white photography captures a world lit by cigarette lighters and clouded by cigarette smoke and the inky sadness in between. If you know Bill Evans already, this movie will send you back to his music with renewed enthusiasm; if you don’t, then you will head to your streaming service, or better still to a walk down vinyl store to engage with the joy that was a counterpoint to the tragedy.  

Everybody Digs Bill Evans premiered at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival.