It’s hardly surprising that director Grant Gee, one of the most outstanding documentarians around – with acclaimed films about Joy Division and Radiohead, as well as inventive explorations of writers WG Sebald and Orhan Pamuk, should make a first fiction feature that escapes the tropes and clichés of genre. His anti-biopic of pianist Bill Evans, winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival, is anything but predictable, although the theme of jazz and heroin has been a recurring topic in the movies, as if the music could not exist without the drug – think Chet Baker, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker and others.
Bill Evans is unquestionably one of the handful of most influential jazz pianists ever. His extraordinary gift for navigating delicate improvisations that recall the perfumed atmosphere of Debussy, Satie and Ravel, as well as hard-swinging phrases and chords rooted in the hardest of bop - not least the inventions of the legendary Bud Powell – are without equal, and charted a new aesthetic in jazz that remains as present and essential today as half a century ago.
Gee’s film, written by Mark O’Halloran is adapted from Intermission (2013), a novel by Owen Martell: a book which avoids standard biography, and summons Evans through the lens of a particular moment in his life – in the early 1960s – at a moment of perfect grace, when he established an unforgettable trio style with drummer Paul Motian and bassist Scott La Faro, which was brutally interrupted by a car accident that took “Scotty”s life.
There was a complicity between the three musicians, in which the accompanists were as same important as the brilliant pianist, in constant and breath-taking conversation that reached back to the polyphony that had characterised the earliest jazz. Although they didn’t always get on personally Evans and La Faro would create a dialogue so exquisite that it has remained cutting-edge and thrilling to this day.
Not surprisingly, Bill Evans, already deep into his career, not least renowned for his essential role in the recording of the Miles Davis Sextet’s master piece Kind of Blue, was struck very hard with the loss of the musical partner who helped him define his mature style. The "intermission” which gave the title to Owen Merrell’s novel, alludes to the time – nearly a year, when Evans stopped playing and plunged ever more deeply into the heaven and hell of heroin. The Norwegian Anders Danielsen Lie – an accomplished jazz pianist himself, filmed playing Evans’s solo – evokes the pianist’s journey with great subtlety: this is not just a picture of self-destruction but the deeply touching struggle with demons that Evans was, paradoxically, mostly strong enough to combat. The darkness that pulls away at the pianist is hard to watch, and the block that grief condemned him too, most palpable.
At first he stays with his brother Harry, with whom he has a touchingly complex relation, shot through with a mixture of affection and jealousy – from Harry’s side, who both worships his brother’s superior gifts and suffers because his own life has felt a failure. Barry Ward brings to the role the emotional range the part demands – this is an all-too familiar picture of fraternal discomfort and love. He eventually throws Bill out, not least because of his heroin habit – sustained in a poisonous yet erotic long-term relationship with Ellaine Schultz, whose lasting love for Evans, is very sensitively brought to life by Valene Kane.
A large slice of the film – perhaps a little excessively – finds Bill back at home with his parents in Louisiana, struggling through cold turkey. His doting mother (a moving performance from Laurie Metcalf, pictured below) caters lovingly to his every need. He struggles with a an emotionally distant father , uncomprehending, and yet proud of his son, in a believable characterisation from Bill Pullman (pictured above). The weight given to the father-son relationship promises more than it delivers, though: we are left with something of a mystery, but that's perhaps preferable to Freudian clichés of patriarchal power-wielding or Oedipal conflict. It’s not clear whether the slow-moving account of the addict’s return home and recovery help the explosion of uplift that's so thrillingly evoked when Bill and his parents listen to his new album. Although interspersed with flash-forwards, the Louisiana stretch of the film feels a little too slow, laboured at times.
One of the film’s most adventurous qualities has to do with the way writer O’Halloran and Grant Gee have handled time. The narrative thread from the early 60’s following Scott La Faro’s tragic death – shot in black-and-white- is interrupted by colour sequences of later moments in Evans’s life, the pianist in the 1970s with long hair and beard. Events that were to shape his later life as much as the bass-player’s crash: his brother Harry whose depressions have morphed into psychosis, and his lover Ellaine, whom he has left for another.
The non-linear narrative generally works very well, though it’s at times a little confusing: we need a moment to tune into the changes, and those sometimes break the flow. But this is an artistic choice that resonates with the often dream-like quality of the film, and the varied perspectives that the intentionally disjointed narrative plays with: moments when we are in Bill Evans’s head, remembering images or hallucinating, and others when we are observing him from other characters’ point-of view.
From the film’s instantly captivating earliest sequence, in which we see Evans with the trio that included Scott La Faro at a gig, we are drawn into a rich visual world in which image – often manipulated, and always magnificently shot by Piers McGrail – takes precedence over conventional narrative. It’s no exaggeration to say that every frame of the film is intriguing or beautiful.
Anyone familiar with Grant Gee’s earlier work will recognise his visual signature, a continual play with light, focus, a dance between close-up and wide shots, that owe a great deal to the experimental cinema that has clearly inspired him. Thankfully, form and style never feel forced, and serve the essence of the story perfectly well. Editor Adam Biskupski works wonders with the footage, which always vividly evokes the 1960s and 1970s, through a kind of haze, rather than the inevitable literalism of slavish reconstruction.
As with Bill Evans’s music – and this is for sure no accident – this is a film whose emotional veracity draws a great deal of strength from atmosphere. There’s no heavy-handed soundtrack manipulating our emotions, just subtly inserted cues from composer Roger Goula, textures and tone colours rather than full symphonic programme music. This subtlety of touch, and quality of soul, are true to the essence of Bill Evans, a pianist who could conjure so much in the way of atmosphere. It is a pity, perhaps, that there is actually so little of his music in the film, not after the scintillating, brilliantly shot and edited opening sequence, pure magic that manages to transcend the recorded original.
To be fair, the story we are told is mostly about a pause in the pianist’s life, a moment of drug-addled grief and creative block. But we deserve perhaps a little more of the miraculous conversation that was so brutally interrupted, as well as the continuing stream of outstanding creativity that poured out of Bill Evans, in spite of his drug dependence and abiding troubled life. Bill Evans, a classic introvert, expressed himself most openly in his music – and we have needed more of that direct contact with the complex inner man.
The final sequence, which manages to simultaneously flash-back and flash-forward, transcending the limits that a linear attachment to time and space impose, reunites Bill and Ellaine ( Valerie Kane pictured above), partners in love and shooting-up. The bliss they attain momentarily, and which closes the film - without surrendering to a redemptive happy end – evokes the highs which, at a cost, undoubtedly played such a crucial part in this extraordinary pianist’s creative life.
