Bill Evans’ patient and downtempo take on modal jazz turned its rhythm from an insistent swing to a slow, deliberate crawl, infusing it with further romanticism and accessibility. A specialist in imaginative non-fiction films on musicians and writers, among them Radiohead, Joy Division and WG Sebald, English director Grant Gee does the same for the tired subgenre of the music biopic in Everybody Digs Bill Evans, which resembles a chamber drama or chamber music more than any large-ensemble bombast. Also a classy star vehicle for Anders Danielsen Lie, playing Evans as a temperamental cousin to his characters for Joachim Trier, it premiered yesterday in the Berlinale’s competition.

Evans’ 1962 live album Waltz for Debby is a core text in the jazz canon – accessible enough for newcomers whilst still being revered by purists. But there’s arguably less of a cult of personality around him than his more iconic contemporaries – such as key collaborator Miles Davis (who thankfully isn’t granted a corny cameo here). With the music overshadowing the man, Gee and Mark O’Halloran’s screenplay (adapting a 2013 novel by Owen Martell, titled Intermission) fills in the details of his biography and the circumstances of his art for non-adepts, and there’s little surprise that the anguished beauty of the music derives partly from similar pain in life. Yet the subtly non-linear dramatic structure, and the content and character psychologising in various passages, still flatter to deceive compared to the still-transcendent recordings.

So, festering beneath Waltz for Debby (and Sunday at the Village Vanguard, its more literally titled predecessor) are grief, sibling rivalry, mental illness and substance abuse. Scott LaFaro (Will Sach), his creative soulmate and double bassist, has suddenly died in a car accident, marooning Evans in a dopesick stupor in his grimy Manhattan apartment – another example of the classic cocktail whereby heroin use is supposedly invaluable for creating work, as he claims, even as his health withers away. The relationship with his brother Harry (Barry Ward, one of the movie’s many Irish above-the-line talents, given its funding) provides the film’s greatest depth and nuance: a frustrated professional musician himself, even as he scrapes a living as a music teacher, Harry tortures himself for losing the genetic “lottery” of talent, with his own sanity faltering as his brother overachieves, even as he provides a consummate level of support, allowing him to move into his flat during this time of crisis. Indeed, Bill’s niece (and Harry’s daughter) Debby becomes something of a surrogate daughter to him, and as he plays the record’s title number on their poorly tuned home piano, we feel how music is his ideal language, through which he overcomes his natural introversion.

Less compelling is a surprisingly long episode where their Florida-dwelling parents (played by Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf) are introduced, and with the former’s enjoyably crotchety if overindulged performance, the tone dovetails from the attractive post-noir atmospherics of the New York scenes to something like a sitcom about the grumpy, yet loving, parents of a jazz prodigy they can’t understand. Titled after an earlier album of his (with a touch of irony given his diffident personality), Everybody Digs Bill Evans commendably vouches for silence and restraint, but risks blanching from any engaging substance at all, like a musical score with too many rests.

Everybody Digs Bill Evans is a co-production involving Ireland, the UK and the USA, staged by Cowtown Pictures, Hot Property Films, Over the Fence Films, Bona Fide Productions and Metropolitan Films. Its world sales are courtesy of Mister Smith Entertainment.