THE SOLOIST Galas

From Academy Award-nominated director Joe Wright (ATONEMENT) and starring Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx and Academy Award-nominee Robert Downey Jr., this poignant and ultimately soaring tale is based on on incredible true story of a disenchanted journalist’s transformative odyssey through the hidden streets of Los Angeles, where he discovers and builds on unlikely friendship with a man from those some streets. Columnist Steve Lopez (Downey) is at a dead end . The newspaper business is in on uproar, his marriage has fallen apart and he can’t remember what he loved about his job in the first place. One day, while walking through Skid Row, he sees the mysterious Nathaniel Ayers (Foxx), pouring his soul into a two-stringed violin. At first, Lopez approaches him as just another story idea . But as he begins to unearth the mystery of how this alternately brilliant and distracted street musician , once a dynamic prodigy , wound up living in tunnels and doorways, it sparks on unexpected quest. Imagining he con change Ayers’s life, Lopez embarks on a quixotic mission to get him off the streets and back to the world of music. But as he fights to save Ayers, he begins to see that it is Ayers – with his unsinkable passion, his freedom-loving obstinacy and his valiant attempts at connect ion and love-who is profoundly changing Lopez.