Originally planned for an Oscar-friendly release last autumn, The Soloist has finally debuted and we can finally learn what Focus Features was so ashamed about. I kid! The Soloist isn't very good, but it's certainly no worse than plenty of the godforsaken 2008 Oscarbait films that did get released on target.

Based on true events, which were given the customary veneer of fiction somewhere between newsprint and celluloid, The Soloist is the story of two men who entered the other's life in Los Angeles in 2005: L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey, Jr.), a writer of human interest pieces, and Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a musical prodigy suffering from schizophrenia and living on the streets. At first, Lopez sees Ayers as a fascinating case, and the perfect individual on whom to hang all sorts of musings about the state of transients in the L.A. area, but as time goes on he slowly becomes Ayers's best and only friend. And as even more time goes on, Lopez decides to make it his mission in life to save Ayers from both homelessness and mental illness, as he discovers, perhaps for the first time, what a human being looks like when he's moved into a state of grace through the beauty of art.

It's a very nice story, although to be perfectly honest, I'm not entirely certain what I, as a viewer, am supposed to get out of it, primarily because of the film's considerable lack of focus. For the most part, the POV is yoked quite firmly to Lopez's point of view, except that from time to time it hops over to a flashback of some event in Ayers's younger days, looking to lay out the path by which he moved from extraordinarily gifted child cellist to adult with crippling mental problems. And sometimes the POV shifts over to Ayers just for the hell of it This isn't really a flaw, exactly - how else do you make a movie with two protagonists? - but it kind of muddies the question of what exactly the film wants to be about: is it the story of how Lopez finds his humanity again? About Ayers overcoming his difficulties? About the transformative power of music? Or just a good old-fashioned Message Picture, designed to make us all aware of the terrible life of a homeless Angelino? I'm inclined to assume that it's mostly the latter; it has some of the same feel of the L.A.-centric Crash, although the exact opposite problem of that film's ceaseless clarity of message. Whatever the case, there's an unfinished feel to The Soloist, as if writer Susannah Grant was so pleased by how interesting the real-life story was that she never actually thought to figure out why. Well, the story surely is interesting, but in this form, not terribly enlightening.

Director Joe Wright doesn't help matters out much, or indeed, at all: he is stuck in the same mode that I at least thought marred Atonement in 2007. Namely, his stylistic choices, though frequently well-executed, don't seem to have any real relationship to the movie at hand. He reminds here as in his last film of an undergraduate film student of good talents and little discipline: every now and then he comes up with a really great shot or cut or sound effect or whatnot, and gives it a prominent spot in the movie without necessarily thinking whether or not that exact placement is really where it belongs. And just to add insult to injury, these moments of brilliance aren't integrated into the rest of the film successfully, leaving a more or less anonymous bit of craftsmanship studded with nuggets of style in no apparent pattern, annoying in Atonement, and downright damaging here, where his glossy ideas conflict with the gritty matter of the film's story. It comes across like he's showing off, just because he can.

And then, there are the stylistic touches that don't even work on their own terms, such as the silly attempt to dramatise Lopez's reaction to Ayers's playing by showing helicopter shots of seagulls flying around downtown Los Angeles, or the less-silly attempt to dramatise Ayers's own reaction to hearing Beethoven as a multicolored light show that reads as an unsuccessful lift from Fantasia.

The cast, thankfully, is good enough to rise above this muddle, almost enough to make the film just nearly worth watching. Downey, Jr. is unsurprisingly terrific in a role tailor-made to his persona: a cynical bastard who melts in the face of things that do not fit into his nihilistic worldview. But you really don't need me to point out that Downey, Jr. is a good actor by this point, do you? The other stand-outs include Catherine Keener as Lopez's ex-wife and editor (giving the journalist a broken marriage was an invention of the filmmakers, and one of very little apparent value), and Nelsan Ellis as David, the operator of the shelter that Lopez tries force Ayers into, in the hopes that it will magically cure him. Both of these actors have essentially the same purpose in the movie, to present a realistically humanist counterpoint to Lopez's early selfishness and later crusading naïvete; both do it with no small success, and I am particularly excited to see a new face in the form of Ellis, a man of at best minor exposure to this point, and talent that far exceeds his name-recognition.

Foxx himself isn't quite up to his co-stars' level, although he has certainly been worse than this in other projects. He's maybe stretching for the awards-friendly Rain Man thing too much, giving a fairly surface-level presentation of a schizophrenic man that's all bout twitches and mumbles, and not nearly as much about the torrent in his skull (though Wright tries to help him out with myriad close-ups). To be fair, he gets the twitches and mumbles down pat; it's not as annoying a performance as it easily could have been. The bigger issue is that Foxx is simply miscast: even with make-up, the 41-year-old actor is too movie-star pretty to convincingly play a 55-year-old who has weathered life on the streets for God knows how long.

The best I can say about The Soloist is that it means well. And it's hardly an awful movie, just one that doesn't have much to recommend it beyond its sincerity. Hey, that's something - it is late April, after all, and we're about to get the storm of shallow-minded effectsploitation movies that we always get from May through mid-August. The Soloist may not be a very great movie for grown-ups, but it is for grown-ups nonetheless.

6/10