The Soloist: Jamie Foxx's latest leaves heartstrings unplucked

By Chris Tookey for MailOnline
Updated: 10:01 GMT, 25 September 2009

In last year's Tropic Thunder, Robert Downey Jr gave an entertainingly scurrilous tutorial on how to win an Oscar by pretending to be mentally ill.

Evidently, Jamie Foxx wasn't listening, for in The Soloist he ill-advisedly goes for what Downey would have called The Full Retard.

The Soloist tells the more-orless true story of Nathaniel Ayers (Foxx), a street musician with paranoid schizophrenia who is befriended by journalist Steve Lopez (Downey). 

Over-rehearsed: Jamie Foxx plays street musician Nathaniel Ayers

Over-rehearsed: Jamie Foxx plays street musician Nathaniel Ayers

Following the tradition of Shine (1996) and A Beautiful Mind (2001), it sets out to pluck our heartstrings on behalf of schizophrenics everywhere.

Sadly, it does so with the finesse of a gorilla in boxing gloves. Foxx is an Oscar-winner thanks to his uncanny impersonation of Ray Charles in Ray, but he plays Ayers as a multitude of tics and non sequiturs.

He is hampered by Susannah Grant's muddled screenplay, which never bothers to tell us why Ayers is so resistant to medical help. 

I have learned that he went through an unsuccessful early course of medication, and was traumatised by electric shock treatment, but you'd never know this from the movie.

All that happens is that he is persuaded to move off the streets and into a small room. I imagine we're also meant to be pleased that he teaches a self-absorbed newspaper columnist to be more sensitive.

But that's not enough uplift to power a film. Downey, normally one of my favourite actors, is miscast. There is always something of the popinjay about him, a touch of the smart alec.

The real Steve Lopez is quiet, decent and - unlike the rackety version of him in the film - happily married. Presumably to make him more interesting, or maybe because Downey just can't do 'decent', the movie version of Lopez is self-centred, self-pitying and hard to like.

Pride And Prejudice and Atonement made Joe Wright look a promising director of costume drama. Venturing into the modern era, he seems all over the place.

His attempts to convey the soaring, therapeutic nature of music are overblown, with an especially embarrassing light show to convey Ayers' thoughts on listening to the Eroica Symphony.

Ultimately, the film seems to say little more than that the mentally ill deserve to be treated with compassion - and who would disagree?

But there remains the nagging suspicion that Ayers wouldn't have been found deserving of movie treatment if he hadn't had a musical talent. Even on Skid Row, these days, it seems you've got to have star quality.

Verdict: A duller shine

Rating: 2 Star Rating