L.A. Times journalist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr., right) tries to help Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a mentally ill classical music prodigy living on the streets in The Soloist. (Paramount Pictures)

Robert Downey Jr. has our affection, and that’s three-quarters of movie stardom. We like him because he’s suffered and survived, and such triumph is the firmament upon which Hollywood is built.

Foxx's schizophrenic character heals some broken humanity in Downey's, an isolated work addict who is barely in tune with those around him.

Brad Pitt is a movie star, but hasn’t he had it a little too easy? Show us the pain, Friendly. A chipped tooth? Choosing between Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie? Please. You don’t know from pain. Downey was caught riding naked down Sunset Boulevard babbling about invisible rats (reportedly). Downey was caught by cops in a Palm Springs hotel room with a Wonder Woman costume and coke (reportedly). Downey spent almost a year in prison for drug possession (absolutely).

Forget about it. Now he’s the star of a superhero franchise, Iron Man, that grossed $582 million (US) worldwide. Then he bags an Oscar nomination for a scandalous role as a white actor playing a black man in the ultimately lowbrow comedy Tropic Thunder. Only there wasn’t really a scandal at all because WE HEART RDJ! On you, blackface = awesome!

That miasma of redemption circles Downey protectively, and it’s interesting to see it at work in The Soloist, another true story about a man, a breakdown and a comeback. It’s also a good reminder of just how flimsy Downey’s hard times mythos is. On the spectrum of human challenges, Downey – a wealthy, educated son of a filmmaker and an actress; a teen movie star; a white guy – is positively Pittian in his fortune when compared to Nathaniel Ayers.

In The Soloist, Ayers is played by Jamie Foxx. He’s homeless and maybe schizophrenic (a word he loathes), a man in a collection of slightly comical, entirely heartbreaking hats who gets anxious when separated from his overflowing shopping cart. He exudes the kind of crazy that most people who live in cities grow inured to — he’s highly visible, yet invisible. Then, on a warm California day, an L.A. Times columnist named Steve Lopez (Downey) hears Ayers playing a two-stringed violin next to a statue of Beethoven. The journalist takes note, and then notes — Lopez’s good-story sensors are beeping. From a lengthy, rambling monologue delivered in a tunnel, Lopez distills that the man in front of him has fallen from great heights. It’s a fortuitous match, for one of them at least: Ayers had been a student at Juilliard, and Lopez has a deadline to meet.

Susannah Grant’s script, based on Lopez’s book, contains an affecting lament for the death of the newspaper. In the background of almost all scenes set in the Times offices, Lopez’s freshly fired colleagues are being escorted from the building by security guards, plants teetering atop boxes of files.

Ayers is a schizophrenic musician at odds with the world around him in The Soloist. (Paramount Pictures)

The Soloist wants us to believe that the stories told by writers like Lopez – unbiased and unearthed – matter, and that a unique kind of truth will be irrevocably lost when newspapers as we know them finally shutter. Director Joe Wright is right: it’s a bleak future when only Hollywood screenwriters can bring people like Ayers to the world’s attention. The Soloist is – inadvertently, I presume – a good example of how millions of dollars and an army of filmmakers can’t convey the simple pathos that a good writer can get across in an 800-word column.

Lopez introduces Ayers to the Lamp Community, a skid row support centre for L.A.’s most marginal populace. The streets are a Boschian tapestry, and there, this mostly soft film turns self-consciously gritty. Many of the people Wright shoots are non-actors, and there’s a hint of Diane Arbus-type cruelty in the camera’s thieving, as an aging woman rambles on unceasingly, or a girl with a facial deformity dances round and round with no one. Perhaps shoehorning these unsettling images into glossy Hollywood fare is fine, a necessary confrontation in a film that poses – clumsily – real questions about how cities treat their least functional citizens. Then again, when is exploitation simply exploitation, and not a commentary on exploitation? That, of course, is Lopez’s struggle as he begins to profit from Ayers’ story.

Foxx is very good: in his closed face and slightly rocking body, he embodies the oppressiveness of mental illness, constantly deflecting an onslaught of words and voices in his head. Ayers has a strictly ordered internal world, where cigarette butts can’t exist and enclosed spaces are a threat, but his logic isn’t in line with how the rest of the world lives. So he’s in constant motion, always leaving, stilled only by music.

But this story isn’t really about Ayers, it’s about Lopez, as per the genre. Rocky Dennis in Mask, Radio, Sam in I Am Sam, Rain Man – they all came along to vindicate those around them, to make the healthy feel better about their own lives. What would a film look like that actually put disabled people front and centre, not just in service to their able-bodied chums and saviours?

Like many Downey characters, Lopez is smart, resourceful; his words aren’t spoken but ejected.

Naturally, Ayers heals some broken humanity in Lopez, who’s an isolated work addict, barely in tune with those around him. Obliviously, he tells his ex-wife (Catherine Keener) that when he watches Ayers enraptured by a symphony, he’s jealous: “I’ve never loved anything the way he loves music!” The statement deals a blow that Keener’s character absorbs with resignation: he’s a better journalist than husband or father, interested in everyone but those immediately around him.

Wright is sentimental, and his hands are anvil-heavy. When Ayers is first playing a cello presented to him by Lopez, birds ascend to the heavens, leaving behind the snaking (and therefore heartless, etc.) L.A. freeways. Music isn’t visual, but Wright tries to make it so, showing Ayers listening and closing his eyes to a kind of psychedelic light show that’s not up to the task of truly conveying the transcendent possibilities of Beethoven. Instead, it looks a lot like what happens when you press hard on your closed eyelids with your fingers.

But it may be worth putting up with so much hokum for Downey. He’s grown from his teen boy days — all pudgy-faced and caterpillar-browed — into an aging, slightly ravaged actor of huge appeal (“ravaged” looks good on him). Another mark of a movie star is predictability, a gallery of familiar, comforting tics and twitches, and Downey employs them all, and well, for Lopez. Like many Downey characters, Lopez is smart, resourceful; his words aren’t spoken but ejected, tumbling and tipping over each other like he can’t keep up with his brain; and always, always, that great physicality that made him such a great Chaplin.

Downey cuts off Wright’s cheesier instincts at the pass, refuting coyness and whimsy in favour of something a bit darker, hints of a life lived hard. With his battered past, and golden future, Robert Downey Jr. controls a film that’s looser than it should be, and better than it deserves to be, simply because he’s there, once again, redeemed and redeeming.

The Soloist opens April 24.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.