Raw talent will only get you so far. More often than not, it’s the people you know and being in the right place at the right time.

The Soloist is an inspirational true story about a musical prodigy crippled by schizophrenia, who unexpectedly gets a second chance at his dream thanks to an influential journalist.

The fractious relationship between the two men is at the heart of Joe Wright’s third feature, which trades in the frocks of Pride and Prejudice and Atonement for the grime of 21st-century Los Angeles.

However, it’s squalor with polish – as with those earlier films, Wright won’t convey emotion in a single image when he can orchestrate acomplex sequence littered with hundreds of real-life homeless extras on a graffiti-strewn recreation of Skid Row.

It becomes abundantly clear that he has one eye staring down the lens, the other on a second Academy Award nomination.

Steve Lopez (Downey Jr) is a columnist on the Los Angeles Times in 2005, whose daily portraits of metropolitan life are missing their old spark.

With a failed marriage to his editor Mary Weston (Keener) behind him, Steve attempts to concentrate on his work, always looking for that one great story.

And he finds it one day on the streets where a homeless man called Nathaniel Ayers (Foxx) is playing a battered two-string violin. Nathaniel claims to be a student at Juilliard and, when Steve checks, the tall tale turns out to be tethered in fact.

A reader responds to the column by sending a cello, and Steve arranges for David Carter (Ellis), who manages the Lamp Community homeless shelter, to take care of the instrument.

Steve then arranges an apartment for Nathaniel and lessons with Graham Claydon (Hollander), a cellist from the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.

However, no matter how hard Steve struggles, he has no control over the voices in the musician’s head.

“You can’t fix LA, you’re never gonna cure Nathaniel. Just be his friend and show up,” advises Mary tenderly.

The Soloist is a worthy drama about the unlikely friendship between two men: one looking to re-discover life, the other embracing it with a volatile passion.

Downey Jr and Foxx give powerful performances, the latter ricocheting between violently confused and playfully sarcastic.

Screenwriter Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich) successfully conveys the desperation of people living on crowded streets, their hopes washed down the gutter many years ago.

Yet everything feels contrived, right down to the comic interludes with Steve trying to ward off raccoons using bags of coyote urine, which slosh down his front. Grant also tinkers with the facts, while the emotional pay-off with Nathaniel’s estranged sister (Hamilton), who thought he was dead, is forced.

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