Harmony and dischord Harmony and dischord

It’s nice to be surprised by a movie. I saw the previews for The Soloist, with its big stars—Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr.—striking gritty Oscar-baiting poses, and I watched the 60 Minutes interviews with the biopic’s real-life subjects: schizophrenic Julliard-trained musician-turned-homeless man Nathaniel Ayers and the L.A. Times columnist, Steve Lopez, who meets Ayers on the streets of L.A. and befriends and writes about him. And, frankly, I had my doubts about a major Hollywood film’s ability to do any more for the story than the moving 15 minutes of documentary that 60 Minutes could—other than pad the egos and résumés of the assembled stars.

For the most part, my doubts proved unfounded, because director Joe Wright’s film version of Lopez’s story, adapted by Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich), does emotionally evocative work on three fronts: the way the relationship between two men changes each of them; the power music has to unify and to restore; and, most satisfyingly, the often sad and frightening life experience of those living with mental illness.

Others have complained about a lack of narrative focus, but that hardly bothers me here since the story was in the news as little as three years ago and the real-life characters are still around. What the film does is take us to the spots the documentaries and newspaper columns haven’t, giving us more time in the shoes of the man with schizophrenia as he walks the earth.

Through flashbacks, we see the young Ayers as a poor prodigy in Cleveland Ohio who gets a chance to attend New York’s prestigious Julliard School of Music, only to have his life upended through sad, slow-burning disengagement from his classes, his family and his own mind as the voices of paranoid schizophrenia take over his life.

These early scenes, as well as those in Skid Row, which employed actual homeless residents from the area in supporting roles, are hard to watch. Not only is Wright’s unflinching focus on confused and tortured souls in obvious pain frightening, the sobering reality for the moviegoer with any level of a relationship to someone with mental illness (or with any level of empathy for our country’s ever-growing homeless population) is gut-wrenching.

Foxx’s turn as the variously emotionally detached, artistically impassioned and raging Ayers is pitch perfect. The movie star is hardly discernable behind the weathered sun-spotted skin of the professional homeless person, and his sweet-voiced non sequitur ramblings are seamless as his expressive turns at the violin and cello.

The vehicle for this story is, of course, the man-on-the-street columnist Lopez (played by Downey) who sees more than just an interesting story and a profile-in-homelessness in this homeless man he finds making music from two ratty strings of a violin. He also sees a man pushing the limits of the power of music by using it to deliver him from extraordinary difficulties, both internal and external.

Downey is on par with Foxx in his inspired performance. Whatever liberties were undoubtedly taken with Lopez’s actual biography, Downey’s version reluctantly goes through transformations that the audience may see coming, yet happen to him in ways that he can’t see until they’ve already taken hold.

Of course, a little Hollywood smog gets in your eyes in spots. There are a few ham-handedly inserted gags (for comic relief at Downey’s character’s expense) that I wish would have been cut. And, while some of Wright’s artistic flourishes are sublime (a torched car, engulfed in flames, rolling silently by a young Ayers’ window is all that’s needed to evoke the Cleveland race riots of the 1960s), others are just distracting—especially the bizarre light show that takes over the entire screen when Ayers first gets a chance to listen in on a symphony rehearsal.

The lasting effect, however, is felt in the resonant portrayals by Foxx and Downey, as well as those natural, haunting cameos by the homeless of Los Angeles.