'Everybody Digs Bill Evans' Shane O’Connor/Cowtown Pictures/Hot Property Everybody certainly does dig Bill Evans in Everybody Digs Bill Evans, but nobody quite knows what the hell to do with him. The year is 1961, and the jazz legend (played flawlessly by Norway’s Anders Danielsen Lie) is firmly in the grip of a raging heroin addiction, having acquired a taste for the destructive street drug made inexplicably romantic in postwar boho circles. For musicians like Evans, who felt their almost supernatural talent was more of a curse than a blessing, the degradation that addiction entailed — the poverty, the nodding out, the humiliation at the hands of dealers — was part of the appeal, leading his biographer to describe his lifelong drug use as “the longest suicide in history.” Grant Gee’s extraordinary, intimate and gloriously experimental film largely takes place in the summer of ’61, when Bob Dylan was still a complete unknown, the ’60s had yet to become the swinging ’60s, and New York City still looked like a glum, gray outtake from the urban ’50s.
