Joe Wright, the formidably talented director of Atonement, now gives us a handsomely made but tonally uncertain film; it's unsure whether to be an old-fashioned inspirational heartwarmer, or a paranoid prose-poem about ruined lives on the city's dangerous margins.
It is based on the genuine, if hammed-up, story of how Steve Lopez, a divorced and disillusioned columnist on the Los Angeles Times, found redemption by chancing upon Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless African-American guy playing a broken-down violin on the streets – and discovered that this Juilliard dropout was some kind of prodigy. Robert Downey Jr is Steve, Jamie Foxx is Nathaniel, and together these lonely soloists show us an awful lot of Acting with a capital A.
Foxx does some serious drama-school OCD gabbling, in preparation for which he must have watched Shine about 78 times. Downey does very much the same sort of thing, in the way that he normally does in every film. The cliche he's saddled with is that of the traditional Hollywood Journalist, who lives the life of a kind of hobo-bachelor, cracking wise with his editor and ex-wife Catherine Keener in his chaotic office, but never having much actual boring work to do.
With its heightened imagery and sound design, the movie tries its darnedest to intuit the troubled, disturbed existence of street-dwellers. This offsets the potential cheesiness – but without making for a very satisfying, involving film.
