‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’ review: achingly cool love letter to a jazz great

For all the beautiful, respectable music they made, many of the 20th Century’s jazz greats led such dissolute lives that they made the stars of metal and rock look like buttoned-down accountants living behind white picket fences. In 1928, Sidney Bechet accidentally shot and wounded a woman during a gunfight with another musician. Billie Holiday’s run-ins with the law are the stuff of legend. And Bill Evans… well, that’s the subject of this suitably stylistic biopic. With his fiction feature debut, director Grant Gee (who made the acclaimed Radiohead documentary Meeting People Is Easy) immerses us in the life, love and all-consuming heroin habit of the supernaturally gifted pianist. READ MORE: The best films of 2026… so far! Rendered mostly in black and white, the movie opens at legendary New York jazz club The Village Vanguard in 1961. Behind the piano, Evans (played by Personal Shopper’s Anders Danielsen Lie) glances up at bass player Scott LaFaro with a conspiratorial look of devotion – the kind usually reserved for a lover. In fact, the pair are musical soulmates, which Lie somehow conveys without dialogue. As the pair lock into a rhythm that one character accurately describes a...