Jamie Foxx plays a homeless man with schizophrenia who is a musical prodigy in "The Soloist," due out this fall, according to a New Yorker profile of the real subject of film, Nathaniel Ayers.
Based on Ayers' true story, the film also stars Robert Downey Jr. as Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez, who wrote a book about Ayers (Foxx), a gifted musician with schizophrenia he found living on Skid Row. The book he wrote is The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music. (Here's a review of the book last week in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
"The Soloist" film also stars Stephen Root and Catherine Keener and is directed by Joe Wright, directed the Oscar-nominated "Atonement."
According to The New Yorker, the production filmed on Skid Row in LA, known as "the country's homeless capital" and used many homeless people as extras in the film.
