Compelling - and dizzying

In the tunnel of a Los Angeles freeway underpass, a bruised man crouches before a grubby street musician who coaxes ecstatic chords from a cello. Beethoven reverberates up from ground level, soaring above the gridlock and grime. Two birds, stand-ins for the soloist and his audience of one, ride the sound waves up to the clouds, spirits spiring.

If only every sequence in The Soloist were that transcendent. Joe Wright's adaptation of the book by columnist Steve Lopez, about the newsman's encounters with Nathaniel Ayers, Juilliard-trained virtuoso sawing his instrument near L.A.'s Skid Row, is as flawed and fascinating as the men themselves.

Jamie Foxx's embodiment of Ayers, a schizophrenic whose only home is his music, is indelible. When he plays the cello or listens to Beethoven, his lined forehead resembles a musical staff, and his onyx eyes dance like notes. Ditto Robert Downey Jr.'s portrait of Lopez, an Inquirer alum trying to land the big one for his next Los Angeles Times column. His urgent need to solve the problem, to diagnose and cure Ayers, brings the viewer into the mind and conscience of a journalist.

The conceit, of course, is that ultimately, the subject reels in the scribe. Susannah Grant's screenplay compresses the events in the book without compromising its complexity. This bracing story shows how Ayers experiences the challenges of homelessness and mental illness and how Lopez applies the balms of friendship and music. Bravely for a studio movie, it never suggests that the balm, even in exalted doses of Beethoven, can be a cure.

Wright (Pride and Prejudice, Atonement), specialist in translating books to screen, is equally capable of subtlety and self-consciousness, sometimes within the same scene.

But the tone of The Soloist is wildly uneven. Though unsparing and unsentimental when framing the principals, Wright is hyperbolic when depicting the agitation of the mentally ill and the soothing rapture of music.

In his mostly subdued film Wright shows the maw of hell that is L.A.'s Skid Row, filming the chaos in frenzied reds and browns that approximate a Hieronymus Bosch inferno. I applaud the director for hiring actual denizens of Skid Row to play themselves, but artistically it's a mistake for professionals and nonprofessionals to share the screen.

For one thing, mixing pros with civilians has the unfortunate effect of making the actors look like impostors. For another, it inadvertently treats the denizens of Skid Row as human props.

I experienced the disconnect between actors and civilians, and yet I was deeply moved by an anecdote told by one civilian who complains about being dosed with meds so she'll stop hearing voices. "Some of those voices comfort me," she says plaintively, articulating that conundrum of whether to medicate or not. Had this observation come from Nathaniel rather than a character we see once, it wouldn't have taken me out of the film into issues of social policy. The issues would have been embedded in the story.

As much as Ayers loves Ludwig van, Wright loves his crane shots. The crane swoops from asphalt to sky, and arcs from Ayers down in the audience listening to the Los Angeles Philharmonic up to the rafters call attention to the camera, not the characters. Admire Wright for trying to find visual equivalents of the exalting music, but limit him to two crane shots per movie, please. His camera moves are like the quivering violins and palpitating timpani of the score to a melodrama.

The Soloist is like a duet being played by a symphony.EndText