by Russ Pulliam

Sometimes Hollywood does more than entertain.

“The Soloist,” in telling the story of a Los Angeles homeless man, stays close enough to the real story to challenge some myths.

The homeless man, Nathaniel Ayers (played by Jamie Foxx), is a gifted violin and cello player who is drifting because of schizophrenia and broken family bonds.

Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) writes a column about Ayers after watching him play the violin on the sidewalk. Normally, Lopez would move on to the next story, but he writes more columns about Ayers and tries to help him.

They make small steps of progress, but they don’t live happily ever after. Score one for Hollywood for minimizing the romantic nonsense and capturing some hard truths about the homeless.

“Often these people are very hard to love,” says Carter Wolf, executive director of Horizon House in Indianapolis.

Horizon provides a day shelter for the homeless. Wolf estimates that half the homeless have a serious mental illness, sometimes mixed with drug and alcohol abuse.

They usually seem anti-social at first. “The serious mental illness is reflected in what seems to be inappropriate behavior. He’s aggressive, he’s a bully, he’s lacking social skills,” Wolf says. “These people are soloists in their lives. They don’t trust other people.”

That can help explain the broken family bonds. In milder cases of mental illness, medication and a loving family can be enough for a person to keep a balance in life.

Wolf remembers a man with an obsessive-compulsive problem. “It was a long slow relationship with one person at first, then eventually all of Horizon House,” Wolf says. The man did move into an apartment and can now work at a part-time job. The key was personal relationships and patient perseverance by the Horizon House staff.

The “Soloist” shows an important debate. One side calls for the right medication. The other side calls for personal compassion and friendship. The real homeless person needs both.

In the movie the columnist becomes frustrated when he realizes that Ayers won’t cooperate with any quick medical fixes. “You’re never going to cure Nathaniel,” says his editor, who also happens to be his ex-wife. “Just be his friend and show up.”

In real life Lopez is married with a young child and tries to balance family and journalistic passion.

In the movie, at one point the Los Angeles mayor shows up and promises $50 million to clean up the homeless problem. Yet subsequent police raids on homeless camps suggest that government-directed utopian schemes do more harm than good.

What Hollywood got right is how personal friendships are crucial for the homeless mentally ill. Great advances in medicine have offered breakthroughs in recent years, but science doesn’t have all the answers and never will.

“The Soloist” isn’t exactly entertaining, but it is educational.