A well-pedigreed drama whose chances for Oscar glory were vastly impaired when it was bumped out of the holiday release season, The Soloist arrives with the unmistakable whiff of diminished expectations. (In case you were wondering, that’s the same smell as an overripe melon.) That it’s a more interesting — if not actually better — movie than at least three out of five Best Picture nominees is a welcome surprise, even if its sheer strangeness was bound to have Academy voters wondering what the hell went wrong.

The Soloist relates a juiced-up version of the real-life story of L.A. Times reporter Steve Lopez’s relationship with Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless man who had been a promising musician before his time at Juilliard was derailed by mental illness. Playing Lopez and Ayers respectively, Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx deliver nuanced performances that continually complicate the usual trajectory of Hollywood tales of bonds made across gulfs of class, race and privilege. Background themes such as the woes of the newspaper industry and the ethical obligations between reporters and their subjects are handled well.

The essential conundrum at hand is that director Joe Wright (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement) can’t decide whether he’d rather be Ken Loach or Ken Russell in his treatment of the material. There are many detours into delirium thanks to Wright’s Russell-like penchant for the excessively baroque (though, since Beethoven is Ayers’ favourite composer, romantic is probably the better term). Thus is Ayers’ experience of an LA Philharmonic rehearsal rendered solely in coloured lights, while the city’s Skid Row — cast by Wright with bona-fide street people — is presented as a Boschian carnival of horrors.

Distasteful and wrongheaded as it may often be, the movie’s too flagrantly odd to ever be boring. One of those Kens would be proud, but probably not the one Wright was hoping for.