When the music stops: a Bill Evans film that barely plays the hits

Grant Gee used to make music documentaries. The Guardian’s piece on Everybody Digs Bill Evans is about him sliding into fiction without dropping the same shape: a person in one state, a crisis, a return that is not quite the old self. The subject is Bill Evans, the pianist on Kind of Blue, the one who pulled Debussy into jazz.

The film does not do the cradle-to-grave biopic. It stays in a few months of 1961, after bassist Scott LaFaro died, when Evans could barely sit at the piano. Gee found him first in a Lee Friedlander photograph: Ivy League cool and visibly spooked. Owen Martell’s novel Intermission gave him a plot that is mostly aftercare, not concert footage.

Gee liked the idea of a music biopic with almost no performance. He did not quite dare it. Anders Danielsen Lie, a Norwegian actor and a real pianist who has transcribed Evans since he was a teenager, plays a few short recreations, including Waltz for Debby. The title, borrowed from a 1959 LP, is not a compliment in Gee’s mouth. Everybody is watching. Evans cannot stand the care.

It is an Anglo-Irish production shot in County Cork that still has to feel like Manhattan and Florida. The real set is interior: what happens to an artist when the thing that makes him himself goes quiet.