"The Soloist" | Reaching out with friendship

Tough-minded yet often touching, "The Soloist" works precisely because it doesn't go where we think it's going to go. Based on a true story (adapted by Susannah Grant) of an unlikely friendship, it's about homeless musician Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) and Los Angeles columnist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.). Brooding one day in a park, Lopez finds Ayers, a clearly troubled, mumbling man making beautiful music with a battered two-string violin. After a brief conversation, Lopez is intrigued and makes a few phone calls. From their encounter comes a poignant column, about how a former Juilliard student, his life altered by mental illness, now sleeps on a sidewalk.

More encounters follow, leading to more columns. Readers donate musical instruments for Ayers; Lopez, concerned that carrying such valuables will make Ayers even more vulnerable on the streets, connects with a local homeless-advocacy organization and tries to encourage his new friend to sleep indoors, and to perhaps take medication that might help him with his illness.

In a typical Hollywood version of this story, Ayers would eagerly embrace the help and find his life transformed, and we'd see him joyously playing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, all his past promise restored, as the credits roll. But real life, and mental illness, is more complicated than that, and so "The Soloist" is about a different kind of transformation. Ayers is a seriously ill and difficult man; Lopez is no saint and becomes frustrated when his attempts to help (such as an informal concert) go terribly awry.

But the two men stick with each other, and change each other in a quiet yet powerful way. Lopez comes to hear music like Ayers does, just a bit: "When [the orchestra] is playing, I say, my God, there's something higher up there, and he lives in it," says Lopez wonderingly. And Ayers, in the tangled web of his mind, learns that he has a friend, to sit beside him at the occasional concert and to forgive him when his anger explodes.

Director Joe Wright, previously known for lush period films ("Atonement," "Pride & Prejudice"), here shoots Los Angeles as a concrete cage. There's nothing prettified about the Skid Row community he depicts, and no false hope in this story. But the music (both Dario Marianelli's sweeping score, and the Beethoven works performed by the orchestra) blooms like a flower in this harsh landscape; we hear it the way Ayers does, as a calming, celestial retreat from the world. And the actors find a genuine connection: Foxx's circular, whispered mumblings reflect the tumult within; Downey's staccato energy reveals a man not just seeking a story, but a purpose.

It took guts to make "The Soloist" this way; it's undeniably depressing on many levels and lacks the feel-good sweep much of its audience may expect. (Much has been written about the film as an elegy for the newspaper business, as reflected in the scenes of Lopez's workplace; I think its depiction of the homeless and hopeless is far more haunting.) But this tale of a "lost traveler," who takes a few tentative steps toward finding a home, is a powerful one — at times soaring like the music it celebrates.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725

or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com