Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) is one of the many columnists of the Los Angeles Times who spends most of his time looking around his city for the next story to write about. One evening, he happens upon a homeless man playing a violin with only two strings in Pershing Square.
Lopez quickly learns that this man, Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), has been living on the streets since he ran away from his second year at the Julliard School. It seems that he was a gifted rising cellist who started hearing voices and had a breakdown under the pressure of the school. With this knowledge, Lopez begins writing a series of columns and begins to befriend the down-on-his-luck musician. As the friendship grows, Lopez and Ayers both grow as individuals.
Quite frankly, despite the fact that this movie is based on true events, it still has the feel of a cliche movie where a man goes slumming and decides to help give some poor person a better life. Never mind the obvious racial aspects of this arrangement, which is truthfully never directly talked about in the movie, but it still has the feel. Actually, one of the aspects I liked about The Soloist was the fact that Lopez's efforts to get Ayres to stay in an apartment, rejoin society and share his talent with the world don't go as well as he (or Hollywood) would hope.
Like I said before, the story being told is good and I enjoyed it a lot. The problems I had with it have more to do with the feel of the film. There are plenty of points where there doesn't seem to be a lot of direction and movement towards whatever goal the film is trying to reach, and there are many segments that feel much more like something you would see at a film festival than a standard mainstream film. Since most of the homeless "characters" are actually homeless people from around the filming-location, dialogue between Lopez and the homeless felt more like snippets of documentaries then movie footage. It just really threw me off and pulled me out of the film.
When it comes down to it, The Soloist is trying to get a message across to the users, and it uses many huge hammers to hit that message home. Not only are the "interview" like scenes mentioned above seen several times, but the DVD's special features are blatant as well. Between the odd animated short, "Beth's Story," about how a fictional character lost her home and the featurette, "One Size Does Not Fit All," which focuses on the homeless problem in L.A., you simply want to ignore the overall message because of how often it is preached to you.
But at least there are a couple of good special features. One I particularly enjoyed was the interview with the real Lopez and Ayers. This short segment was really good because it shows you just how well Foxx nailed his role. The other, your standard "Making Of..." featurette, gives you all the usual tidbits including the filming locations and how the movie came to be.
Overall, I would say that this is a movie that can be missed. I enjoyed the idea of the story, but the overall presentation mad it not worth the effort. Both Foxx and Downey Jr. do excellent jobs in their roles and I can only imagine the amount of practice it took for Foxx to get as good with the cello as he did for this role, but the rest of the package didn't do their effort justice.
