If we have learned anything about the musical biopic over the last few decades it is that the best approach is to use some smaller part of the life as synecdoche. Let the audiences draw conclusions from a few days or months.

Grant Gee’s wonderful study of Bill Evans at a key fulcrum is an exquisite case in point. The New Jersey-born pianist could be seen as the Chopin of jazz. Working in elegant harmonies, he brought melodic grace to a host of trio recordings as leader and served as the gentlest voice on Miles Davis’s legendary album Kind of Blue.

Adapted by the unstoppable Mark O’Halloran from Owen Martel’s novel Intermission, the film begins with a skilful, impressionistic re-creation of the trio gig recorded for the great LP Sunday at the Village Vanguard.

Ten days after that booking, Scott LaFaro, the trio’s bassist, died in a car crash, sending Evans, then a heroin user, into an emotional crisis that kept him from the piano in the weeks leading up to the release of the Village Vanguard record.

The Norwegian actor Anders Danielsen Lie overcomes any language and accent difficulties to make Bill into a quiet mess of neuroses. It’s unsurprising such a man would produce that controlled, introverted music. The great melodic reach in Evans’s records has a less conspicuous echo in Lie’s tense performance, but there is no real reason that should be otherwise.

Barry Ward, admired Irish performer, is impressively grounded as Harry, his supportive older brother, a music teacher. When the two fail to find a way out of the emotional stasis, Evans heads off to spend time with Mom and Dad in Florida.

Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf, aged up to accommodate how people of the actors’ generation might look in 1961, give delightful performances that hint at unspoken tensions. These are the years when the hugest of generation gaps was opening up and, though the music is not beyond them, we grasp their desperation at what the jazz life may have done to their son.

Flash-forwards in Kodachrome colours to an out-of-shape Bill in the 1970s confirm, for those unfamiliar with the pianist’s sad arc, that any recovery here will ultimately lead on to later decline.

Grant Gee, who won best director at Berlin International Film Festival for the picture, was saddled with more than a few challenges. Set in Florida and New York City, Everybody Digs Bill Evans was, in fact, shot quickly in west Cork.

Piers McGrail’s gorgeous monochrome photography helps position the film’s present in a clean and precise nowhere. Though organised and well paced, the editing gives a hint of the improvisational feel that is so vital to the jazz aesthetic.

Irish-UK biopic of jazz pianist Bill Evans wins prestigious award at Berlin Film Festival

O’Halloran’s script is wise enough not to tell us how Evans got the way he did. Explanations for his mighty talent are as absent as cod-psychological justifications for his addiction. The fine Newry actor Valene Kane is subtly distressed as Evans’s girlfriend Ellaine Schultz, also a heroin user, but we are not nudged towards any oversimplified arguments about codependency.

The film is soaked in sadness for a troubled soul, but it does also permit us (just a little, anyway) to wallow in the unmistakable coolness of jazz in the years before it was eaten aloud by the rock boom.

Hearing the first chords of Gloria’s Step from Sunday at the Village Vanguard counts as gentle epiphany. The black-and-white shots of fingers on bass and keyboard recall great photographs of the postpop era.

This is not a film that elbows you into submission, but, in its minor-chord fashion, it stands comparison with great jazz movies such as Bertrand Tavernier’s ’Round Midnight and Clint Eastwood’s Bird.

In cinemas from Friday, September 11th