CASEY PHILLIPS: If you have even the slightest sense of fellowship with the rest of humanity or are familiar with the healing power of art, “The Soloist” will inspire you. The story centers on Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx), a man with a love of music so profound that it carries him through a struggle with mental illness that dogs him from the halls of New York City’s Juilliard School to Los Angeles’ skid row.

There, he meets and befriends Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.), a gruff, aloof columnist with the Los Angeles Times. Their relationship forms the movie’s soul.

That the film is based on real events — a series of columns and a book written by Lopez — adds even more emotional oomph. It’s fascinating to watch Lopez’s parasitic relationship with Ayers (originally, he’s just a curiosity to fill a weekly column) morph into a symbiotic friendship.

Downey is well known for a history of self-abuse, and since his resurgence last year, he’s found a way to use that history to strengthen his performances of characters with similarly damaged pasts. Lopez, a man estranged from his family and all but friendless, benefits immensely from the added realism.

As in “Ray,” Foxx becomes his character. It’s not hyperbole to suggest his performance of Ayers, a schizophrenic homeless man, is as awesome and inspiring as Dustin Hoffman’s in “Rain Man.” Foxx handled what must have been an incredibly challenging role (requiring musical performances, bizarre costumes and unhinged dialogue) with aplomb.

HOLLY LEBER: At its heart, “The Soloist” is a love story. Not in the conventional sense of romance but in other ways. Lopez, who has become jaded by years of deadlines and daily grinds, allows himself to actually be moved by the consuming love Ayers has for music. Through that, a brotherhood of sorts grows between the two men. His interaction with Ayers opens Lopez up to the idea of being inspired beyond a great story.

A scene midway through the film has Ayers playing a cello under a bridge while Lopez kneels in front of him, taking in the music. It’s spiritual, it’s salvation, it is, as Lopez’s ex-wife (Catherine Keener) tells him, grace. Conversely, a character later in the movie who proselytizes about religion is cringeworthy. There’s a real purity to Ayers that infuses the story.

CASEY: As a musician, I was surprised by how well that feeling of reverence was captured. The film manages what “August Rush” tried (and failed) to do by embodying the near ecstatic connection between performer and art form.

It also analyzes the relationship between journalist and source, something Holly and I both are familiar with. In the case of Lopez and Ayers, that relationship begins very onesided as Lopez views Ayers as just a way to fill a quota. The transition to mutual respect is engrossing.

Lopez’s primary struggle is that he begins to feel compassion — an emotion he has distanced himself from — for a complete stranger who’s down on his luck. Downey and Foxx put on performances that seem kinetically opposed to the point that they meet going opposite directions. It’s a joy to behold.

HOLLY: “We had some life, didn’t we?” Ayers asks his sister (Lisa Gay Hamilton) in a scene that sees the two meeting after years of estrangement. Some life, indeed. The film incorporates flashbacks to Ayers’ youth that show the rising genius of his musicianship and the eventual avalanche of his illness.

During some of the scenes where the music was more heavily featured, I found myself looking over to catch Casey’s reaction, since I’m not a musician or an artist. I definitely identified more with Downey’s character, for several reasons. As a writer, you do pray for a story like this to fall in your lap, but there is the question of who are you writing for and who you might be hurting or exploiting or even helping. As reporters, we’re instructed to keep a certain emotional distance, but sometimes the best stories come from getting a bit too close. When Lopez started focusing more on Ayers as a man and less as a source, the relationship between the men blossomed.

Director Joe Wright served the facts well, avoiding any temptation to pretty up the story. There was no happy, milquetoast ending that found Ayers working a desk job in a suit, Lopez back with his wife and both of them happily wielding ladles at the soup kitchen.

CASEY: I’ve never seen a movie before that better epitomized the innate reverence between man and his neighbor or man and music (buy the soundtrack, by the way). It’s a joyful celebration of friendship and trust and music that is easily the best movie so far this year.

HOLLY: It’s a beautiful, lump-in-the-throat kind of a film that celebrates the human spirit and its ability to rise from the ashes.

“I’ve never loved anything the way he loves music,” Lopez says of Ayers. If you’ve ever known what it’s like to feel like inspiration has eluded you, to feel like you’re too tired and hardened to be truly moved, not just know you ought to be, you’ll empathize with Lopez. You’ll know what he means when he says that, why it hurts and ultimately why it matters.