Francois Duhamel/ Paramount PicturesReview in a Hurry: This is a movie about how awesome Steve Lopez, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is. Really, he's awesome. He makes friends with homeless people and stuff. And he's played by Robert Downey Jr., so he's probably secretly a superhero, too. Good performances save this from being a lame hagiography. Just.
The Bigger Picture: Four years ago, against the backdrop of Hurricane Katrina, and the beginning of major cuts at the Times, Lopez came across a homeless cello player named Nathaniel Ayers (here played by Jamie Foxx), and wrote a column about him. Turns out the schizo musician once went to Juilliard, and his story touched the hearts and minds of numerous readers who wanted to help out and give Nathaniel a forum for his music—whether he liked it or not.
In amateur hands, this could have been yet another cliché-fest about a mysterious black man teaching the whitebread hero everything he needs to solve his own issues before dying or disappearing in timely fashion (see: The Green Mile, In America). In the hands of director Joe Wright (Atonement), it's a little bit messier. Ayers isn't painted as a saint; he's genuinely crazy in a potentially dangerous way, and kudos to Foxx's lack of vanity on that score. Lopez is still Robert Downey Jr., so we like him even when he's kind of a jerk. But just to bring him down to earth, screenwriter Susannah Grant has contrived two separate sequences in which he gets urine sprayed on him.
There's a lot going on here that isn't really given its due—the hypocrisy of L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's homeless programs, the downsizing of old media—and it often feels like Wright has bitten off more than he can chew. But points for ambition: one sequence in which we are made to see the music as Nathaniel does gets into Fantasia-like realms of color, and will doubtlessly be enjoyed by college kids in ways other than intended.
That said, we never truly get inside Nathaniel's madness—the movie, though it tries to be evenhanded, is still Lopez' story, and he's easily the more boring of the two. With Downey in the role, however, it takes quite a while to notice that.
The 180—a Second Opinion: Some of the small details are way off—in 2005, did Lopez really have an answering machine rather than voicemail? And didn't any of the filmmakers know that you have to stay perfectly still during a CAT-scan?