I MAKE MOVIE REVIEW-The Soloist

You can scoff at the story, which reeks of sappiness and Oscar bait-Lowlife reporter Steve Lopez (Robert "Iron Man" Downey Jr.) tries to reform diseased genius Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx). You can brush off The Soloist as more blah based-on-a-true story crap. Or you can leave your reservations at the door and experience the weirdest, smartest, most thrillingly alive movie biopic to come along in ages. Let's start out with Susannah Grant's script. As she proved with Erin Brokovich, Grant knows how to move and involve audience without clubbing them over the head with a Big Ass Message (TM). She paces the story nicely, and isn't afraid to journey into pitch-black corners of Ayer's strange mind--the kind that often get glossed over in this type of movies. However, Grant also knows when enough is enough-just when there's no light to be found in this roller-coaster ride of a story, she tosses in a rococo gag involving coyote urine (you read that right) or a uses a coffee cup to produce a much-needed chuckle. It all works. The standard of excellence continues to the production staff as well. Director Joe Wright works in tandem with composer Dario Marinelli and lenser Seamus McGarvey to create a thousand different visual tricks-anything from theatrical spotlighting to thoroughly creepy, repetitive, Lynch-esque images of crying children-to get at what's going on inside the head of a schizophrenic. Not all of them work, but when they do-a la the Kubrick-esque light show that translates Ayer's connection with music into a kaleidoscope of color and emotion-they're nothing short of magic. And then there are the actors. With the exception of a dryly funny Catherine Keener as an overworked colleague of Downey's, the entire movie belongs to the two men. A pairing such as this comes along rarely-think Pacino and Deniro in Heat. Both actors are known for their commitment to reality over preachiness, and they don't disappoint here. Downey shows unflinchingly how Lopez's desire to help Ayers overcome his illness turns into helpless frustration as he realizes not everything can be cured. Foxx deftly sidesteps cliche, delivering his lines with a loose off-handness, mutter feverishly in a confessional almost-whisper, so that when the Big Stereotypical Cray-Cray True Story Movie Mental Breakdown does arrive, it's a harrowing, wholly unexpected explosion that seems to knock the world as we know it straight off its axis. The film offers not one easy answer in its entire 117 minute run-time. What it does offer is a great, ripped-from-the-headlines tale, tears that are eased out with honestly instead of being forcibly jerked, and two of our greatest male actors doing a high-wire act of a duet that pays moving dividends. They make beautiful music together. A-