The Soloist

Saturday 26th September 2009, 8:54AM BST.

Raw talent will only get you so far.

More often than not, it’s the people you know and being in the right place at the right time.

The Soloist is an inspirational true story about a musical prodigy, crippled by schizophrenia, who unexpectedly gets a second chance at his dreams thanks to an influential journalist.

The fractious relationship between the two men is at the heart of Joe Wright’s third feature, which trades in the frocks of Pride & Prejudice and Atonement for the grime of 21st century Los Angeles.

However, it’s squalor with polish because as with those earlier films, Wright cannot convey emotion in a single image when he can orchestrate an intricate tracking shot or a complex sequence littered with hundreds of real-life homeless extras on a graffiti-strewn recreation of Skid Row.

It becomes abundantly clear that he has one eye staring down the lens, the other on a second Academy Award nomination.

Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr) is a columnist on the Los Angeles Times in 2005, whose daily portraits of metropolitan life are missing their old spark.

With a failed marriage to his editor Mary Weston (Catherine Keener) behind him, Steve attempts to concentrate on his work, always looking for that one, great story.

And he finds it one day on the streets where a homeless man called Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) is playing a battered, two-string violin.

Nathaniel claims to be a student at Julliard and when Steve checks, the tall tale turns out to be tethered in fact.

A reader responds to the column by sending a cello and Steve arranges for David Carter (Nelsan Ellis), who manages the Lamp Community homeless shelter, to take care of the instrument.

Steve then arranges an apartment for Nathaniel and lessons with Graham Claydon (Tom Hollander), a cellist from the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.

However, no matter how hard Steve struggles, he has no control over the voices in the musician’s head.

‘You can’t fix L.A., you’re never gonna cure Nathaniel.

Just be his friend and show up,’ advises Mary tenderly.

The Soloist is a worthy drama about the unlikely friendship between two men: one looking to re-discover life, the other embracing it with a volatile passion.

Downey Jr and Foxx give powerful performances, the latter ricocheting between violently confused and playfully sarcastic.

Screenwriter Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich) successfully conveys the desperation of people living on crowded streets, their hopes washed down the gutter many years ago.

Yet everything feels contrived, right down to the comic interludes with Steve trying to ward off raccoons using bags of coyote urine, which invariably slosh down his front.

Grant also tinkers with the facts – Mary and Claydon are both fictional – and the emotional pay-off with Nathaniel’s estranged sister (Lisa Gay Hamilton), who thought he was dead, is forced.