If The Soloist were a piece of music, and not a movie, it’d be a series of lingering flat notes with one or two noticeable highs towards the end of the composition.

Surprising, right? Considering those lending their lungs to the lyric sheet?

But it’s not ‘Oscar Winner’ Jamie Foxx or ‘Oscar Nominee’ Robert Downey Jr’s fault at all (in fact, both are as excellent as you expect them to be), just a slow, indolent, unfocused screenplay.

Based on the true story of a struggling reporter who discovers a musical genius living on the streets of Los Angeles, The Soloist is a well-intentioned film that’s so slowly paced, and so uninterested in getting to the point, that it’ll lose half of its audience by the time the, er, music kicks in.

Director Joe Wright (Atonement) has two films here - one is the life-changing story of redemption; the other is about the repercussions of being redeemed. None of them are particularly that interesting - nor focused.

An award-winning columnist with the Los Angeles Times, Steve Lopez (played here by Downey Jr.) ultimately becomes an advocate for LA’s homeless population when he meets Nathaniel Ayers (Foxx), a talented musician who’s been playing a two-stringed violin while living on the streets and battling mental illness. Lopez starts writing about the homeless music-man in his column, and in turn tries to get him off the streets and on a stage where he should be.

Sure, Ayer’s story is moving, and it’s actually quite gratifying to see both of the lead characters climb themselves out of the black holes they’ve ostensibly dropped into willingly, but the feeling and nuance found in author Steve Lopez’s book is hard to spot in the film version.

If a director more suited to this kind of material (Wright is better-known for his historical dramas - usually starring Keira Knightley) had been chosen to bring Ayers and Lopez’s uplifting tale to the screen, the goose-bumps may have risen - they should have. The audience will recognize that there’s an important story being told here, and that they’re supposed to be feeling a lot more than they are, but at the end of the day, they’re going to walk out of the movie feeling as they’ve watched ‘yet another’ so-so story of salvation and mental-illness - the likes of which play on the Hallmark channel each and every weeknight - only this features better performances (no offense to Melissa Gilbert and Janine Turner).

Foxx never plays Ayers as sort some of object of pity, intentionally staying away from Rainman territory. And through the use of words, gestures, and, repeatedly, an awkward mutter, the actor gets the point across that he’s playing a person, not a condition, here. Downey Jr is good too, bringing his world-weary hipness to the role of Lopez, but his character is underwritten - and, based on what I remember from the book, not half as interesting as he was on paper. Lopez should be as important a player in the story as Ayers, but it doesn’t quite play that way here. Amazon Lopez’s book instead.