Everybody Digs Bill Evans is a 2026 biographical drama directed by Grant Gee and written by Mark O'Halloran and Owen Martell, adapted from Martell's 2013 novel Intermission. Produced by Cowtown Pictures, Hot Property Films, and Bona Fide Productions, the film stars Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie (Sentimental Value) as the legendary American jazz pianist Bill Evans, with Laurie Metcalf and Bill Pullman as his parents, Barry Ward as his brother Harry, Valene Kane as his girlfriend Ellaine, and Katie McGrath as his sister-in-law Pat. The film premiered in the Competition section of the 76th Berlin International Film Festival on February 13, 2026, and is currently seeking US distribution.
Grant Gee arrives at this project with an unusually apt pedigree. His documentary work has traced the creative lives and emotional costs of musical greatness in films about Radiohead, Joy Division, and others, and that accumulated understanding of how art and suffering coexist gives Everybody Digs Bill Evans a textural authenticity that most music biopics never approach. This is not a film about Bill Evans's career. It is a film about a specific season in his life, the weeks and months following the death of his bassist and closest musical collaborator Scott LaFaro in a car accident in 1961, when Evans retreated into grief and deepened his heroin dependency. By choosing to dramatize the intermission rather than the performance, Gee has made something genuinely unusual: a jazz biopic that understands music deeply enough to spend most of its runtime in silence.
Story and Screenplay: The Intermission as Its Own Kind of Music
O'Halloran's screenplay, faithful to the spirit of Martell's novel while reimagining it for the screen, opens with a stunning recreation of the Bill Evans Trio's legendary June 1961 sessions at New York's Village Vanguard. The camera moves between the musicians with an intimacy that feels less like documentation and more like eavesdropping on a private language, fingers moving across piano keys, a bassist's face lit with pleasure, the particular silent communication of three people playing as one. What the sequence establishes, before anything else, is the nature of what will be lost. When the editing then cuts forward to LaFaro falling asleep at the wheel of his car, the visual contrast between those moments of transcendent communion and the ordinary accident that ends them is the film's central emotional argument: genius and tragedy exist in the same ordinary world.
What follows rejects the conventional rise-fall-redemption architecture of the music biopic entirely. There is no career retrospective, no montage of Evans's greatest triumphs, no tidy resolution to his addictions. Instead, the film traces a man in retreat, moving from his chaotic New York apartment to his brother Harry's family home to his parents' retirement house in Florida, carrying his grief and his heroin habit with him to each location. The screenplay's understanding of how grief operates is unusually sophisticated. Evans does not process his loss dramatically. He absorbs it, redistributes it, lets it settle into every interaction as a kind of background radiation. The script gives his mother Mary one of the film's defining lines: that sometimes the intermission is part of the music. It is a grace note the film earns completely because everything leading up to it has been so carefully undemonstrative.
The screenplay's principal weakness is a slight inconsistency in the brief color-saturated flash-forward sequences that punctuate the film's predominantly monochrome 1961 timeline. These glimpses of Evans and those close to him in the 1970s and at the moment of his death in 1980 are visually striking and conceptually purposeful, suggesting that LaFaro's death was the first in a chain of losses that defined Evans's life. But they are too brief and too elliptical to fully elucidate what they are meant to show, and they occasionally interrupt the film's sustained atmospheric rhythm in ways that feel more disruptive than illuminating. This is a minor reservation in a script of real intelligence and emotional honesty, but it prevents the film from achieving the complete formal unity its best sequences promise.
Acting and Characters: Lie Carries a Legacy With Quiet, Unmistakable Authority
Anders Danielsen Lie's performance as Bill Evans is a sustained act of internalized portraiture. He plays Evans as a man who has compressed himself to the minimum, gaunt and reticent, existing behind his glasses and his cigarette smoke as though the reduced surface area offers some protection against a world that keeps taking things from him. It is a performance built almost entirely from what is withheld: the moments when Lie's face almost opens, when something close to feeling crosses his expression before being gently suppressed, are where the film's emotional force concentrates. That Lie is himself an accomplished musician and performed all the piano sequences himself only deepens the authenticity of what is an already remarkable character study.
Laurie Metcalf and Bill Pullman as Evans's parents are the film's most openly pleasurable presences, and their scenes together in the Florida retirement house carry a warmth and dry comedy that provides genuine relief from the film's more airless passages. Pullman's Harry Sr. is a man who has told himself the story of his comfortable retirement as a hard-earned reward for decades of blue-collar labor, and Pullman plays the faint hollowness beneath that story with a precision that makes the character's one drunken moment of emotional disclosure genuinely startling. Metcalf's Mary is simultaneously tough and tender, a woman who understands more than she acknowledges, keeping her son's condition from her husband while silently watching him through the night during his withdrawal. Both performances are, in the truest sense, scene-stealing, which creates the film's one tonal complication: their sheer screen presence occasionally pulls focus so completely from Evans that he temporarily becomes a supporting character in his own biography.
Barry Ward's Harry Jr. is the film's most quietly complicated performance. His jealousy of his brother's talent is rendered not as resentment but as a form of self-directed defeat, the particular misery of someone who knows exactly what he is not. Katie McGrath brings genuine warmth to Pat, Harry's wife, whose concern for both the brother and the husband creates a household of managed anxiety. Valene Kane's Ellaine, Evans's girlfriend and fellow addict, has limited screen time but makes each appearance count, her expression perpetually on the edge of some vulnerability she is not quite ready to show.
Direction and Technical Aspects: Gee's Narrative Debut Announces a Filmmaker of Rare Visual Intelligence
Gee's transition from documentary to narrative fiction is handled with a confidence that comes from knowing exactly what kind of film he wants to make. His approach throughout is one of restraint and accumulation, resisting the impulse to dramatize or explain what can instead be observed. The high-contrast black-and-white cinematography by Piers McGrail is one of the year's most visually distinctive achievements, drawing on the jazz photography tradition of artists like William Claxton and Lee Friedlander to create a world of deep Indian-ink shadows and ash-white light that feels genuinely mid-century without being merely decorative. The predominantly interior production, filmed in County Cork standing in for New York and coastal Florida, uses composition and light to encode each domestic space with its own emotional character.
The editing by Adam Biskupski deserves particular recognition for its management of the film's most demanding structural challenge: the opening sequence. The intercut between the Village Vanguard performance and the car accident that kills LaFaro requires precise rhythmic calibration, building the communion of the musical performance to a point of genuine transcendence before the intrusion of the crash. Biskupski's work here is exemplary. The same skill carries through the film's later passages, where the pace necessarily slows to match Evans's own withdrawal from the world, and where the editing must convince the audience that inertia and grief can be as dramatically engaging as action.
The production design is meticulous in its period accuracy and genuinely evocative of the early 1960s without tipping into nostalgia. The Florida sequences in particular, with their suburban leisure surfaces and the particular quality of American retirement comfort in that era, are rendered with a specificity that makes them feel inhabited rather than reconstructed. One well-documented integration of archival footage from D.A. Pennebaker's Daybreak Express into the New York subway scenes is seamless in the final cut, a small technical achievement that speaks to the overall care with which the film's period atmosphere has been assembled.
Music and Atmosphere: Roger Goula's Score and Evans's Own Music Create a Layered Sonic World
Roger Goula's original score is a significant contributor to the film's overall atmosphere, shifting between a groaning mechanical quality that suggests Evans's grief and something more ineffably tender that surfaces as his relationship with his parents gradually restores him. The score never attempts to imitate Evans's jazz but works alongside it, providing an emotional commentary that complements the restraint of the performances without substituting for them. Goula understands his role here is to deepen the film's existing mood rather than create one, and the music functions accordingly.
The film's use of Evans's actual recordings is sparing and precisely placed. There are relatively few moments of extended musical performance, and the choice to withhold the music functions as a structural correlative to Evans's own inability to play during his period of grief. When the music does appear, it carries an accumulated weight that it would not have if deployed more liberally. The overall sonic atmosphere of the film is one of its most carefully constructed elements, building a world of cigarette smoke and ambient urban noise in the 1961 sequences that gives way to the outdoor Florida soundscape of insects and lawn mowers and the particular quiet of suburban American retirement. The contrast reinforces the displacement Evans feels in each environment without a word of dialogue required.
Strengths and Weaknesses
What works:
- Anders Danielsen Lie's performance is a masterclass in internalized portraiture, communicating an entire emotional interior through withholding rather than expression.
- Laurie Metcalf and Bill Pullman deliver two of the year's finest supporting performances, bringing warmth, humor, and surprising depth to the Florida sequences.
- Piers McGrail's black-and-white cinematography is visually magnificent, evoking the jazz photography tradition while serving the film's emotional register throughout.
- The screenplay's refusal to follow conventional biopic structure is genuinely brave and consistently rewarded, finding drama in retreat and silence rather than incident.
- The opening Village Vanguard sequence is one of 2026's most accomplished pieces of filmmaking, establishing the film's central emotional argument with precision and beauty.
- Roger Goula's score complements the film's atmosphere with intelligence, never overreaching but always present where needed.
- Barry Ward's Harry Jr. is a quietly devastating portrait of talent's shadow, the specific misery of the almost-gifted.
What doesn't work:
- The color flash-forward sequences, while visually bold and conceptually purposeful, are too brief and elliptical to fully land, occasionally disrupting the film's sustained atmospheric rhythm.
- Metcalf and Pullman's formidable screen presence occasionally shifts Evans to the periphery of his own story, a consequence of casting so effectively against him.
- The film's commitment to affectlessness, while thematically appropriate, produces some passages of genuine inertia that will challenge audiences who need conventional dramatic momentum.
- Valene Kane's Ellaine is underwritten relative to the importance of her relationship with Evans, functioning more as a recurring visual motif than a fully realized person.
Final Verdict: A Biopic That Understands Art Well Enough to Honor Its Silences
Rating: 8/10
Everybody Digs Bill Evans earns its 8 out of 10 rating as a film that achieves something rare within a genre notorious for its predictability: it finds a form adequate to its subject. Bill Evans's music was characterized by a lightness of touch that produced a disproportionate depth of feeling, and Gee's film operates on exactly that principle. The restraint is not evasion. It is the point. The film understands that the most honest thing it can do with a genius who existed, as he himself describes it, "outside life" in order to create, is to sit in that outside space with him.
Jazz lovers and Evans enthusiasts will find this essential viewing, not as a comprehensive biography but as a genuinely felt encounter with a particular period of creative and personal extremity. Admirers of the tortured-artist genre who are tired of its clichés will find Everybody Digs Bill Evans a refreshing demonstration of what the form can achieve when the director is willing to trust atmosphere over incident. Fans of Lie's work in The Worst Person in the World and other Joachim Trier collaborations will find him operating at his ceiling here. And anyone who has never heard Evans's music will leave wanting to.
Those who need narrative momentum, emotional release delivered on a clear schedule, or the familiar satisfactions of the conventional biopic will likely find the film's sustained understatement more frustrating than rewarding. This is a film that accumulates rather than propels, that withholds more than it gives, and that asks considerable patience in return for its rewards. But those rewards, when they come, including the bar scene between Pullman and Lie that is one of the year's finest single scenes, and the quietly devastating image of Evans's parents listening in the dark to their son play, are the kind that settle under the skin and stay there.
Everybody Digs Bill Evans premiered at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival on February 13, 2026. US distribution is currently being sought. Language: English. Runtime: 102 minutes.
 Movie Review: Anders Danielsen Lie Is Sublime in a Jazz Biopic That Dares to Sit in the Silence){kind=link}
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