By Dexter "Box-Office" Reel
Grant Gee has spent three decades filming artists at the edge — Thom Yorke nearly drowning inside a diving helmet for Radiohead's "No Surprises," David Bowie's fractured mythology, Joy Division's doomed frontman, the exiled clarity of novelist W.G. Sebald. Now he's turning that same unflinching, dreamlike camera on Bill Evans, the American jazz pianist whose delicate touch on the keys sat alongside a decades-long heroin addiction that eventually killed him.
"It's a narrative form I've used again and again," Gee told The Guardian. "A character begins in one condition; a crisis slowly develops; the viewer watches that crisis in a forensic yet empathetic way; the crisis passes; the person returns to something like the original state, but transformed. Someone comes very close to drowning, but doesn't drown. What does that do to them?"
Evans's story fits that template with brutal precision. He helped rewrite jazz piano on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, then spent the rest of his career chasing — and losing — moments of that same grace to addiction. Gee's pitch, per the Guardian's account, is a biopic about what happens "when the music stops": not just the silence after a great performance, but the silence of an artist who kept playing while everything around him fell apart.
Details on cast, release date and distribution weren't included in the available reporting, and this desk hasn't independently verified them — worth flagging for readers eager to know when and where they'll see it. What is clear is the pedigree: a director with a genuine track record of getting inside difficult, gifted people without flattening them into cliché. That's a higher bar than most music biopics clear. Whether Gee's Evans finds that same balance remains to be seen.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."