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The minute Robert Downey, Jr.’s jaded reporter meets up with Jamie Foxx’s babbling musician in “The Soloist,” it seems the film is going to be a treat. These terrific performers sharing the screen should and often do translate to gold, but it can’t defeat a meandering, frustrating plot.
Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez (Downey) wants to get a story out of the street musician who plays on two violin strings and introduces himself as Nathaniel Anthony Ayers Jr. (Foxx), spelling out every letter. Nathaniel is a musical genius who dropped out of Julliard 30 years earlier when schizophrenia began to plague him. Now he sleeps on the streets of L.A., worships Beethoven, becomes frantic at the sight of litter and can only transcend his mental illness when he’s channeling the splendor of music.
Downey and Foxx brilliantly inhabit these characters, based on actual people whose account was published in 2008 after a series of Lopez’s columns focusing on the troubled prodigy Ayers. The transformative performances and beautiful cinematography painting L.A.’s cityscape as both majestic and gritty are talking points, but the story can’t decide what it wants to be or what direction to take in arriving at its destination.
“The Soloist” isn’t a buddy movie or a redemption story, but a sad, noncommittal spin on urban homelessness and mental illness. The closing credits enumerate the amount of homelessness in Los Angeles, but to what purpose? To assert that if everyone befriended one homeless person, as Lopez did Ayers, everything would be a little better? It’s never clear, especially with an ending that inadequately attempts to wrap the story’s moral in a bow.
Director Joe Wright, who last helmed 2007′s “Atonement,” takes some nice chances with the movie, like a prolonged, trippy visualization of how the musical wizard Nathaniel experiences classical music. A performance by Nathaniel on cello is also treated beautifully, played from beginning to end in an L.A. tunnel while traffic whirs and pigeons flap to provide the applause – it’s the sound of the city Nathaniel adores. The movie isn’t short of transcendental scenes like this, and it’s stocked with humor from Downey’s quips and Foxx’s off-the-wall wardrobe of sequins and various headwear.
“I’ve never loved anything the way that he loves music,” Downey tells his editor-slash-ex-wife, played by Catherine Keener (“The 40 Year Old Virgin”). That rings true, but similar sappy comments at the film’s conclusion don’t make up for the disjointed two hours that make up “The Soloist.”
Grade: C+
