The Soloist

When a movie’s trailer makes big promises, the film itself rarely measures up to expectations. Billed as an emotionally soaring saga based on the true story of “a lost dream, an unlikely friendship, and the redemptive power of music,” “The Soloist” tries hard to take our emotions for a ride but never quite leaves the ground. Though the performances are convincing and compelling, the movie is weighed down by its insistence on subordinating both music and personal narrative to a broader social message.

The story of Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) has ample potential to be poignant and transformative. A man whose early talent for the cello propelled him to The Juilliard School and boundless opportunity, somewhere along that journey he lost himself. The movie never gives sufficient evidence as to why or how, but when we first see him, he’s living homeless and schizophrenic in the tunnels and streets of Los Angeles.

Enter Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.), an eccentric, popular Los Angeles Times columnist who, despite his professional success, seems to be barely keeping it together. He goes flying over his bike on the way to work, accidentally sprays a bag of coyote urine in his face as he cleans his backyard, and works with his snarky ex-wife (Catherine Keener). With this, the movie constructs the seemingly perfect set-up for an unlikely friendship between two men who desperately need comebacks.

Lopez conveniently runs into Ayers on the street, and, fascinated, pens a series of columns about the experience. Later in the film, he brings Ayers to live in the LAMP Community for the homeless, and it is here that the film is most compelling but also most misguided. The portrayal of the plight of L.A.’s homeless is straightforward, unapologetic, and sometimes violent. The transcendent beauty of Beethoven’s music—Ayers’ favorite—clashes constantly with the images of the desperate and abandoned vagabonds, and the conflict is intentional and incisive. But the heavy emphasis on this political undercurrent of urban suffering detracts from what should be the focus of the film: Ayers’ personal struggle to find redemption through music.

Director Joe Wright (“Atonement”) makes Lopez’s intentions toward Ayers clear: “I met a man who was down on his luck and I thought I could help him.” But this motive bears little in the way of transformation or even explanation. The 1996 movie “Shine,” whose plot is almost identical to that of “The Soloist,” traced the struggles and recovery of pianist David Helfgott to a provocative and satisfying resolution. Unlike that movie, however, “The Soloist” never answers the question it first posited: can music and human care provide the courage to reclaim what’s been lost?

This does not take away from the genuine nature of the film’s performances. After an Oscar-winning portrayal of musical genius Ray Charles in 2004, Foxx does not disappoint with his take on the remarkably idiosyncratic, capricious, and conflicted musician Ayers. Robert Downey Jr. has a much less dramatic character to work with, but he manages to spin Lopez into a quirky, not completely selfless version of the quixotic hero. The problem lies not in the dynamic between the two men but rather in the seemingly arbitrary twists and turns of the plot.

The film’s end carries no sign of redemption, little trace of failure, and a wealth of ambiguity. This outcome makes it difficult to view the film as either a commercially successful blockbuster or an intelligent social commentary. “I’ve never loved anything as much as that man loves music,” Lopez says of Ayers, but the movie never actualizes that sentiment.