This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Half narrative, half experimental film, The Soloist uses jump cut editing, a lurid sound palette and unsettling imagery to make a convincing case for how mental illness must feel. But then, it spins 180 degrees around to also reveal the contours of bliss. If the symbolism is a bit heavy-handed at times, it is also intensely elevating.

The Soloist tells the true story of Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a former cello prodigy whose debilitating submersion into schizophrenia while a student at the illustrious Julliard School of Music drove him from the arms of a loving family to the Dante’s inferno of L.A.’s Skid Row. While playing a two-stringed violin on a street corner one afternoon, Ayers is overheard by Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.), a sardonic, disenchanted L.A. Times reporter desperately looking for his next story. Lopez is fascinated by Ayers and his situation. How does an obviously brilliant man with such a remarkable talent end up dressed as a clown on the street? How does he go from concert halls packed with admirers to an audience of prostitutes, heroin users and hoodlums? Playing up the human interest angle, Lopez embarks on a quixotic quest to help Ayers set his life back on a healthy path and realize his musical dreams, never bothering to ask himself if that is what Ayers wants.

The Soloist is a movie lost in space and time. Originally set to debut last fall just in time to be prime Oscar bait, the film was suddenly yanked and given an early spring release, tucked in between the late winter dreck and explosive summer popcorn flicks. In a way, it is the perfect place to hide, an exquisitely told, masterfully directed, splendidly acted film from Academy Award-nominated director (Pride and Prejudice , Atonement ) Joe Wright, who has left period filmmaking behind to tell a contemporary story. But that does not mean he has abandoned his epic eye or his microscopic attention to detail. The Soloist has the same sweep and majesty as his previous films. Wright employs a cheeky expository structure, using Lopez’s columns as the film’s narration, though not as completed, polished pieces, but rather the constantly evolving, self-edited jumble of thoughts that indicate a story in process. When the voices in Ayers’ head take over as narrators for a time, it is all the more disconcerting.

The Old Testament tells us that when King Saul was tormented by an evil spirit, the young shepherd boy, David, would sit with him and play his harp, and instantly the music calmed the troubled monarch. Saul isn’t the only person in whom music calms the savage beast. When Ayers plays, he is no longer a sick man, but something ethereal, something transcendent. The music puts him in a sort of rapt ecstasy, like the quasi-sexual rapture seen in Bernini’s famous statue, The Ecstasy of Beata Albertoni. A scene in which Beethoven’s music is interpreted as a kaleidoscope of pulsating colors is worth the price of admission alone.

Lopez isn’t a hero and Downey doesn’t play him as one. Sure, he is fired from within by a certain missionary zeal that transforms from basic utilitarianism to profound humanitarianism over the course of the film, but if he is looking for some sort of redemption in Ayers, he doesn’t find it. Instead, he perhaps finds something more serene and longer lasting. If anyone has any doubt that Downey Jr. has redeemed himself, they should look no further than this film. Foxx, in his best performance since Ray , plays Ayers as a man caught in the maelstrom of voices inside his head. Only in his music can they be drowned out and he find peace. Evasive and guarded, he is clearly mad but can be surprisingly forthright and warm when necessary. Foxx’s Ayers is a delicate man, which makes an unexpected burst of wrath near the end of the film all the more startling.

The Soloist is about these men and their unconventional friendship. But it does not romanticize Ayers’ or anyone else’s illness. Caring for the mentally ill is a profoundly disorienting experience, the film seems to say, with no easy answers and even fewer easy solutions. The film is not so naive as to suggest that music, either in isolation or combined with a treatment battery, can heal Ayers’ unruly mind. But it does suggest that that mind imagines music as the thing that can heal the world…or at least the urban sprawl that is Los Angeles.

And yet, The Soloist is not about music. Not really. This is not a high-brow Mr. Holland’s Opus . The film deals with music, homelessness, metal health, a debate over the existence of God, the dangers of exploitation, and somehow even manages to fit in the death throes of the newspaper business. The Soloist is more interested in trying to show, both on a literal, street level and an interior one, what madness looks and feels like. The result is a world of frightening physical squalor — as if all of Los Angeles has become a cuckoo’s nest of shattered lives and wrecked souls — and a dreamlike trance state, dazzling one moment and repulsive the next.

For all its considerable strengths, The Soloist appears to lack a cohesive narrative focus, which may, oddly enough, be intentional. Neither high art nor commercially mainstream, The Soloist draws us in yet never gives us the expected emotional payoff, the inspirational catharsis if you will. Because it’s not about that.

Some may see the conclusion of the film as a cinematic surrender. But it’s not. The Soloist does not advocate for no care for the mentally ill, but rather insists that the first step in healing — and yes, in some cases, the only step — is not an alteration of the circumstances, but an admission that it is better to simply be close to someone in the midst of their pain, rather than always trying to proactively manipulate the situation, no matter how benevolent the intent. When “normal” is intangible, no more solid than a breath of smoke, to force it where it never has belonged may just make things worse.

The soloist may be a prized position, but he is also, for a period at least, profoundly alone, the object of intensely focused, undistracted attention. The isolation, be it on the concert stage or a mental state so crippling it detaches one from the rest of humanity, can be devastating. It is in times like this that a steadfast friend is imperative. Whatever else The Soloist is about, it is about that. And it does that marvelously well.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.