THE SOLOIST

Rated PG-13; 120min  

Location: Alamo South Lamar

Hollywood heavyweights Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. team up in this drama based on a true story. Foxx (RAY) stars as Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless man with remarkable musical talent, and Downey Jr. (IRON MAN) plays a writer who realizes the man's gift. ATONEMENT and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE filmmaker Joe Wright moves away from historical Britain to direct this film.

That's the official synopsis of this film. But sometimes the bare bones description of who's in it and what it's about isn't enough to inform and enlighten. For those purposes, we give you an excerpt from David Denby's excellent review in The New Yorker:

Beethoven’s music gives THE SOLOIST momentum and grandeur, and Wright, trying to match it, uses the camera rhetorically but with greater eloquence and precision than he did in the show-offy ATONEMENT.

The boy in the basement looks out a window and sees a burning car slowly rolling backward down the street. Is it a riot? The flames are a startling reminder of Nathaniel’s distance from passions that are not his own.

Wright soars over Los Angeles’s tangled freeways like the angels who hover over Berlin in “Wings of Desire,” and, at one point, trying to capture Nathaniel’s contentment as he listens to a rehearsal, he sends the camera sweeping over the Philharmonic and past its music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and then right to Foxx’s face. The charitable will overlook such follies as Wright’s giving us a prolonged onscreen light show during Nathaniel’s bliss-out.

Wright makes mistakes, but, just when you think that the ethical and aesthetic presumptions of THE SOLOIST are turning into vapor, the movie shrewdly comes back to earth. Steve forces Nathaniel to join Lamp Community, a shelter for homeless people with mental problems, and, outside the building, Wright assembles what seems like every lost and wrecked person in the city. He then does something odd and generous: he halts his moralized story of friendship and lets the people on the street tell their tales.

The strange narratives make their own kind of music, and Downey, whose glittering dark eyes tell you that he’s known crazies before, stays and listens. I don’t know if Beethoven and a sympathetic newspaper reporter can redeem a messy American city, but this movie makes a plausible case for so fervent a dream.

Kid Policy: 18 and up; Children 6 and up will be allowed only with a parent or guardian. No children under the age of 6 will be allowed.

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