Grant Gee’s film thoroughly inhabits the creative and personal torment experienced by the American pianist – with a terrific supporting Bill Pullman turn

This elusive, ruminative and very absorbing movie presents its successive scenes like a sequence of unresolved chords carrying the listener on a journey without a destination – and is, incidentally, one of those rare films featuring a wonderful supporting turn that does not undermine or upstage the rest. It’s a film about music. Particularly, about what remains when a musician cannot play and is left to consider the terrible sacrifices made, without conscious consent, to this all-consuming vocation that creates family pain and jealousy almost as a toxic byproduct. It’s a drama to put you in mind of Glenn Gould and Hilary du Pré, sister of Jacqueline.

Screenwriter Mark O’Halloran has adapted the 2013 novel Intermission by Owen Martell about renowned jazz pianist Bill Evans. It focuses on a period of emotional devastation for Evans, when no music was possible – perhaps a restorative intermission, perhaps the start of a calamitous new aridity – when his close friend and bassist Scott LaFaro was killed in a car crash in his 20s.

The genre-hopping bass virtuoso has backed Ariana Grande and Herbie Hancock, appeared in Star Wars and become a dedicated boxer. Ahead of his fifth album, Stephen Bruner explains his polymath mindset

It is an overcast Thursday afternoon at the end of January, and Thundercat is telling me about the time he tried to interest Snoop Dogg in the mid-70s oeuvre of Frank Zappa. He wasn’t Thundercat then, he explains. He was still Stephen Bruner, bass player for hire, who had fetched up in what he calls a “stupid-as-hell, Rick James-level band” backing the venerable rapper, packed with Los Angeles jazz luminaries who would later contribute to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly: Kamasi Washington, Josef Leimberg, Terrace Martin. Alas, their jazz chops were sometimes deemed surplus to requirements. At one point, while Bruner was playing an expansive bass solo on stage, Snoop sidled up to him and flatly announced: “Ain’t nobody told you to play all that.”

So perhaps it was in the spirit of horizon-broadening that Bruner took it upon himself to play Snoop the song St Alfonzo’s Pancake Breakfast, a knotty, marimba-heavy slice of jazz-rock from Zappa’s 1974 album Apostrophe, which switches time signatures three times in less than two minutes, and features lyrics about a man stealing margarine and urinating on a bingo card. “Yeah, I hit him with the rollercoaster,” Bruner chuckles. “He was smoking, and he almost ate his blunt, saying: ‘What the hell is going on?’ I said: ‘My sentiments exactly.’ I think I did a cartwheel after that and left the band: I played Snoop Dogg St Alfonzo’s Breakfast, my job is done here, I have no more work to do.” He thinks for a moment. “Or maybe I got fired: ‘Get out of here dude, you’re too weird.’ I forget. It was a great moment.”