Festival correspondent Shannon Cotter reports from the ground at the Berlinale, turning her attention to Everybody Digs Bill Evans, which won the Silver Bear for Best Director for Grant Gee in the main competition.
Shot on location in Ireland and scripted by Mark O’Halloran, Grant Gee’s Berlinale entry is a heavy music biopic that strays far from the norm and excels in doing so.
The announcement of music biopics can often be met with scepticism: is there perhaps too high a chance of seeing the same thing again? Often going for a glossy, toe-tapping crowd pleaser, directors frequently meet their creative match. This is especially the case, if the subject in question is still alive to preside over what may and may not be truthful.
Everybody Digs Bill Evans is far from this. A mostly black-and-white, insular drama, the movie often feels like a stage play, with the impressive dialogue pulled from the honed skill of O’Halloran’s craft. Days after helming a legendary performance that would go on to spawn two of the most famous jazz albums ever, the legendary Bill Evans is met with tragedy when one of the essential trio, Scott LeFaro, dies in a car accident. Devastated, he moves in with his brother Harry (Barry Ward) and his attentive wife Pat (Katie McGrath), as the uncertainty of creating music again swirls around him.
Evans’ music feels like more of a backdrop to the film than a driving force, as the musician withdraws into a shell of solitude. Played by Anders Danielsen Lie, who’s perhaps best known for his work with Joachim Trier, Evans is a quiet, unmoving figure whose expressions and silence communicate a heavy weight. It is easy to imagine a person like that being intimidating in real life; it is even easier to imagine the same man bottling up his guilt and turning it inward. This in turn does as much damage to his physical body as the heroin use he engages in with his striking, quasi-girlfriend Ellaine (Valene Kane).
Despite the titular character being the lead, the film comes into full swing under the performances of Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf, who play Evans’ salt-of-the-earth parents. It is harder to think of a lineage farther away from their son. Having worked their whole lives until their retirement move down to Florida, both display a well of pride for their son. Pullman, in a spectacular performance, conveys an easy-going grittiness, his face constantly twitching as he basks in his son’s success. It’s too early in the year to call an Oscar nomination, but Pullman can certainly mark it down as one of his best pieces of work.
There runs a darker thread, though, of unfulfilled dreams for both father and brother alike, with Harry Sr. remarking drunkenly about “squeezing [himself] into a life that is too small.” Similarly, Harry Jr., a struggling music teacher, mourns the talent gap between them, being sibling to the jazz ingenue. Pestered by his own mental health issues, the two generations of men all suffer silently in the same manner, despite the differences in their personalities.
Guided by the hand of cinematographer Piers McGrail, who was also responsible for 2025’s dynamic Saipan, Everybody Digs Bill Evans oozes a sleekness and classiness that makes it seem like it emerged right from the 70s. The most well-sculpted scene takes place within the first five minutes, when the camera flits between strings, piano and close-up features until it intermingles with that fateful crash.
What will distinguishes Everybody Digs Bill Evans from its predecessors and successors is that it is a painfully heavy music biopic; apt for a man described to have “the longest suicide in history.” Often music is a solace and it can be seen here for Evans, so potent that a wavering in it proves to be detrimental to his life. Sequestered between dingy rooms, trails of smoke and bubbling heroin spoons, there lingers a weight on virtually every character in the film. Even the veneer of a sunny Florida nuclear family cannot save Bill’s parents or his brother. Whatever unhappiness they suffer seems to almost be genetic.
Some of the time jumps can be a bit confusing, as discordant a timeline as the fugue of Evans’ drug-addled brain. But it’s glossy, evocative, the speech nailed with the honed skill of O’Halloran’s script. Primarily shot in West Cork, there’ll be a few places familiar to Irish viewers, most notably the hilly surroundings of Harry Sr.’s golf course, but the strong focus on interiors and the blurring shots of New York City add to that stage-like feel.
This is the peak of independent cinema. There is some irony in the title: the feel-good jilt of Everybody Digs Bill Evans fails to match the quiet internalisation of the mostly monotone man. Yet under the hand of Gee’s direction, O’Halloran’s sharp observations and two knockout performances from Metcalf and Pullman mean there's something for everyone to dig in this biopic.
Everybody Digs Bill Evans premiered on 13the February 2026 at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival in official competition, then screened at Dublin International Film Festival on 21st February 2026.
