The soloist movie cast trailor

The Soloist is a thoughtful film with a large heart, but it’s somehow missing a beat. Perhaps it’s that the story on which it is based, the unexpected friendship between a Los Angeles Times columnist, Steve Lopez, and a homeless street musician suffering from schizophrenia, Nathaniel Ayers, is already familiar through coming attractions, Lopez’s columns and book (The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music), and a recent “60 Minutes” piece. It doesn’t help that Susannah Grant’s screenplay turns Lopez, who in real life is married (the production notes say “happily”), into a single guy undergoing a mid-life crisis, whose ex-wife is also his editor. Further cementing the fictional Lopez’s damage is a face-bruising bicycle accident that occurs in the movie’s first scene. The parallelism between one of society’s winners flailing alongside a societal “loser” is a little obvious, depriving the story of what one suspects are the subtler gifts the friendship offers both men.