Who’s in it?: Robert Downey, Jr. (Weird Science, The Pick Up Artist), Jamie Foxx (TV’s In Living Color, Any Given Sunday), Tom Hollander (Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Pirates of the Caribbean 2 & 3), Stephen Root (Office Space, O’ brother Where Art Thou?), Catherine Keener (Being John Malkovich, Where the Wild Things Are)

Let’s get the ball rolling here.  So RDJ is a writer for a news paper.  Jamie Foxx is a schizophrenic former musician turned homeless man.  RDJ wants to do a story on this guy but quickly learns that befriending a crazy guy off the street isn’t always as easy as it seems.  The movie is based on the true story of Nathaniel Ayers (Foxx) and the L.A.  Times writer, Steve Lopez (Downey, Jr.), that found him on the street and helped him get his life back together.

Okay The Soloist is a fine movie, I guess.  This is a good enough movie and all.  It has great acting performances all around but the movie really fails to connect on any personal or emotional levels.  It’s one of those movies you’d think would get nominated for an Oscar based on previews, etc. but then you see it and almost feel cheated when its over.  Sometimes producers think they can just throw a few good actors on screen, base the movie on a true story of someone with some sort of handicap or affliction and think its gold.  It’s just simply not the fucking case here.

RDJ is great and Foxx is good here and they have great chemistry together.  There are some sad moments and the film does a good job of focusing on the isolation and confusion felt by Foxx’s character.  Yet it doesn’t quite deliver.  It’s what you think and nothing more.  Sometimes that’s good enough, here it’s not.

I can’t say I didn’t like the movie because I did like it but its probably not something I’d go out of my way to watch again, therefore I’m sot sure I’d ask anyone else to check it out.

6/10

Would I recommend this movie?: Partly, yes, because it is well acted and RDJ is pretty good to watch in just about anything these days, but the movie is really kind of blah.  So unless you’re a fan of RDJ or Foxx or just curious to learn the movie adapted version of the life of Nathaniel Ayers, pass on this one.