Grant Gee’s new film, Everybody Digs Bill Evans, dramatises a few months in 1961 when the influential American jazz pianist was paralysed by grief following the death of his bassist, Scott LaFaro. Rather than offering a conventional cradle-to-career biopic, it focuses on Evans’s withdrawal from music, addiction and attempts by family members to care for him, examining the human cost behind his artistic brilliance.

Gee, known for impressionistic documentaries about figures including David Bowie, Radiohead and Joy Division, was drawn to Evans after seeing a photograph that made the pianist appear both stylish and deeply haunted. The film adapts Owen Martell’s novel Intermission, following Evans from New York to his parents’ home in Florida and back to Manhattan with his girlfriend Ellaine. Evans had helped reshape jazz piano, played on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and brought a romantic, Debussy-influenced style to the genre; Gee says the film is deliberately about “what happens when the music stops”, rather than centred on performances.