The great Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba takes an unusual route to investigating, remembering and immortalizing a Brazilian “samba jaza” and boss nova pianist in “They Shot the Piano Player.”

He turned his search for answers about the talent, life and disappearance of Francisco Tenório Júnior into an animated docu-drama.

Rather than make a straight documentary out of all the interviews he’d been doing or archiving about this seminal ’60s “Bossa Nova Craze” Brazilian, who disappeared after a Buenos Aires gig in the dictatorship that was 1970s Argentina, the director of “Belle Epoque” and “Memories of My Father” reunited with his collaborator on the animated music history romance “Chico & Rita,” Javier Mascal.

They’d animate these interviews and bring Tenório Júnior, as he was known, back to life by playing g his jazz performances on classic Brazilian records, bathing this colorful film to live with his music and animating a version of Tenório Júnior who’d perform with various ensembles in clubs all over 1960s and ’70s South America. And the filmmakers would contrive a framing story and cast actor and jazz pianist of some repute Jeff Goldblum to “star” in “They Shot the Piano Player” as a writer researching the bossa nova craze for a book.

A few films have taken this novel approach to filling in the narrative gaps in their feature film or documentary by animating the entire movie, with the Armenian genocide docu-drama “Aurora’s Sunrise” being one of the best examples.

The result here doesn’t always work. Almost all of the interviews were conducted in Brazilian Portugeuse, and it’s hard to appreciate the beauty and the wit of the (under-animated) animation and virtuoisty of the music when you’re reading subtitles for long passages as we hear from this famous musician, that widow, friend or mistress of the brilliant pianist, who played on many of the great Brazilian records of his day and fronted a band for one marquee album under his own name.

Trueba, who scripted this, probably needed to make more of a case that this music took over the world at the same moment the French New Wave exploded in cinema. The two art revolutions can be linked and appear to have inspired one another. But that case isn’t wholly nailed-down here.

But the film that resulted is a solid music history lesson and a sad and intriguing mystery with animation, a movie that uses black and white sequences and brisk and colorful “carnivale” flashbacks for visual variety, a way of further jump-starting the energy of the piece.

Goldblum plays Jeff Harris, a New Yorker writer who appears at a reading and “an evening with” at New York’s Strand Bookstore. He regales the audience with how he “discovered” this missing icon, became infatuated with finding those who knew him and could tell his story and got a book out of this deep dive into Brazilian culture and the ugly and murderous history of American-backed coups that turned many South American and Central American states into dictatorships where citizens weren’t just arrested and jailed. They disappeared.

Harris learns only a little about Tenório Júnior’s early life, just that Chet Baker was a big influence and pianist Bill Evans was his idol. What our reporter is looking for isn’t just people who loved him and played with him and thus appreciated his genius, but those acquaintances and friends, the widow and the still-living mistress weighing in on what he was like and how that might have led to his late night arrest in a foreign country he’d just arrived in to begin a tour.

Tenório Júnior was “apolitical” and “a radical,” “an intellectual” and “kind of childish” as he struggled through a fallow period that coincided with a Brazilian dictatorship, frustrated and “trapped” in many ways, and jumping into an affair with a wife, four children and a baby on the way back home.

We see the animated Harris take plane, car and boat trips all over Brazil and into Argentina to find answers, meet former Argentinian functionaries who might know something and human rights officials who want to help him find enough answers to finish his book.

It’s a fun and always fascinating approach. And even though we don’t hear “the piano player” talk, he speaks through his mastery of the piano, pulling off virtuoso runs and showing chemistry with every artist and ensemble he teamed up with.

Catch this movie in a theater and you may find youself dusting off your bossa nova LPs, or haunting the vintage vinyl stores to get your hands on the good stuff, which is all Tenório Júnior ever promised and delivered in a performance — a flawed, complicated man whose escape from his real world problems, some of them self-inflicted, was always his music.

Rating: PG-13 for smoking and some violence.

Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Tony Ramos, Malena Barretto, João Gilberto, Gilberto Gil, João Donato, Judith Said, Bud Shank and many others.

Credits: Javier Mascal and Fernando Trueba, scripted by Fernando Trueba. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:42