The Soloist is about the journey of a friendship between two people with different backgrounds and living different lives. The story is an adaption of The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power Music written by Steve Lopez. It is about a friendship between Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.), a columnist working for Los Angeles Times and Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) a brilliant and distracted street musician who was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio.

He studied music under Harry Barnoff at the Cleveland Music School Settlement and at Ohio University as one of its scholars. On his freshman year he auditioned and was granted a scholarship at Juilliard School’s music division and studied there for three years. The two met when Steve, the father of three children and lives in Los Angeles with his wife Alison and their daughter Caroline went into a transformative odyssey through the hidden streets of Los Angeles.

In the movie, Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) was divorced to his wife and was on his height of his career but was on a dead end and so he went for a walk down Los Angele’s Skid Row and saw a man, Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), playing a two-stringed violin. He then realized that Ayers is a distracted soul suffering from schizophrenia, and so he wanted to make a story out of Ayer’s life however, as he began to know more about Ayers, he made it into a mission to save Ayers from where he’s at and bring him back into the world he used to be and the world that he should be… Back to the world of music, the world of Beethoven and Mozart, and play the cello. But as their friendship grew deeper, it turned out that it was Lopez who needs saving from his world of emotional detachment.

Sometimes, life can be really ironic. Sometimes, we meet someone and thought that he/she needs help and so we go and try to save them but only to realize it is us who needs saving. And sometimes, we never realize it until we take a walk away from all the things that we have and from our comfort zones to see that there is that part in our lives that needs fixing. Sometimes, it comes as an event, a tragedy or we meet someone who opens our eyes to the reality that we are in. People’s normal reaction when they meet a schizophrenic is to walk away but as what this movie wants to convey “No one can change anything by playing it safe”, tells us that sometimes, doing things outside our normal routine and see things in a different light can help bring about change not only in ourselves but on the things and the people around us. Just like in the lives of Steve Lopez and Nathaniel Ayers.
  

Movie Statistics:
Directed by Joe Wright
Produced by Gary Foster, Russ Krasnoff
Written by Susannah Grant, Steve Lopez (articles and book)
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Robert Downey Jr., Catherine Keener
Music by Dario Marianelli
Studio: Working Title Films, Participant Productions
Distributed by DreamWorks Pictures (USA), Universal Pictures (non-USA)
Released on April 24, 2009, September 11, 2009 (UK)
Duration: 109 min
Country: United States
Language: English