Film Review: Everybody Digs Bill Evans

Onwy Gower

‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’ is an entirely singular account of jazz musician Bill Evans’ life and times with a heavy focus on the period following bassist Scott LaFaro’s untimely death following a car crash in 1961.

Rather than focusing on Evans’ grieving process, it instead presents the idea of an ‘Intermission’ for Evans, as he retreats from his New York apartment where he was using heroin with his girlfriend Ellaine to stay first with his brother, Harry, and then with his parents in Florida. This time may be seen as an unusual focus point but as Mary Evans (played by Laurie Metcalf) says in the film, “Sometimes the intermission is part of the music.”

Discomforting

As the film started I felt it zig-zag between paces which originally feels messy and discomforting, but as the film develops it becomes apparent that the pacing is intended that way, to convey Evans’ outlook on this time. The pacing is possibly a token of Grant Gee’s filmmaking, as it is reminiscent of his 1998 documentary, ‘Meeting People is Easy’ centered on the band Radiohead.

Source material

The film is based on Welsh-born now Paris-based author Owen Martell’s novel, ‘Intermission’ which was originally published in 2013. The blurb reads, “In measured, evocative prose, Intermission takes a period from the life of one of America’s great artists and fashions it into a fiction of extraordinary imaginative skill and ambition. The novel inhabits the lives of four people in orbit around a tragedy, presenting an intense and moving portrait of the burden of grief, and of a man lost to his family and himself.”

Intermission

One place where the film fails is the marketing; it is not a film about the seminal album ‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’ or indeed a biopic about Evans’ illustrious career, but rather about this ‘Intermission’ as demonstrated in Martell’s original book title. If the film shared this title the wider audience would perhaps see this film more for what it is; an uncomfortable depiction of a struggling man shown shockingly from his perpective whilst keeping the viewer firmly detached from Evans himself. Not only is this film weirdly emotional despite this detachment, it is intensely stylistic. It usually keeps to a vibrant black and white style, with the 1960s fashion in full effect as the men are draped in suits and tidy shirts, with the women in pin-up dresses with bold make-up. The unmoving camera keeps the focus directly on one person or object at a time, with the cuts between shots almost feeling like Bill Evans himself blinking, as we also see him drifting in between his heroin injections. 

Immersive

This intense style of filmmaking immerses the viewer into this tiring world as Evans becomes clean from heroin, before time jumps to the colourful 1970s scenes as a reminder that this intermission will not change his fate. However, you do not need to know anything about Bill Evans or his jazz trio prior to watching this marvel of a film as the story works entirely even without any context. The simple story does not require any knowledge of Evans’ work, his life or its end; it is just a film about a man who happens to be an virtuoso. And, because this film is based during Evans’ gap in playing publically, hearing those sporadic moments of piano all the more magical.

Fleeting moment

All in all, this film is an indie must-see from 2026. With a world premiere in the Berlin Film Festival – where it won the Silver Bear for Best Director – it was sure to make a splash, but I did not expect to care so deeply about such a fleeting film or film about a fleeting moment. It manages to stay in your mind despite nothing seemingly jumping out whilst viewing, by the end the entire runtime feels like a gut-punch. Despite some filler scenes I could have done without, this film is a spectacle of cinema starring some must-see actors, from legends Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf, to hardworking Anders Danielsen Lie and rising star Valene Kane. I highly recommend watching this, whether it be for the style, story or acting; it is a surprising supernova of emotion.

Everybody Digs Bill Evans will be showing at Penarth Pier Pavilion from the 12 to the 18 October and in Theatr Gwaun, Fishguard on 26 November.

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