“The true story of Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) and his friendship with Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Fox)–a schizophrenic street musician whose illness masked his musical genius–this film traces an adult friendship’s uneven trajectory.”

That it does.

“What did the apostle Paul, Muhammad the prophet, Joan of Arc, and Gyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevshy have in common? All of them were intensely religious All of them had mystical visions. And some scientists now think all of them may have owed at least part of their intense feelings to temporal lobe epilepsy, a neurological disease that causes abnormal electrical firing in the limbic system. . . .

[Temporal lobe epileptics] are hyperreligious. The attend religious services twice a day, build shrines in their homes, and have long conversations with God. They give up their jobs and ignore their familieis to pursue their religious interests. They become zealots.”

“The temperature dropped into the teens the night Kelvin Black sat down in SLC and never got up again. At 39, the homeless man had slept outside for much of his life, but things were finally looking up. Since spring, he’d had his own room at an apartment complex for the formerly homeless, Palmer Court — though it took him a while to unfold the clean sheets and stop sleeping on the floor.

He should have been one of the success stories. Instead, Black died on the sidewalk about a block and a half from his new home on Dec. 4. Black, who suffered from alcoholism, didn’t follow his friends when they encouraged him to go back to Palmer Court on that bitterly cold night. He was among the 58 people — a new record — who died this year after struggling with homelessness.”

The holy peninsula of Mount Athos reaches 31 miles out into the Aegean Sea. For the past 1000 years or so, a community of Eastern Orthodox monks has dwelled there, purposefully removed from everything except God. The monks, in their heavy beards and black garb–worn to signify their death to the world–represent an ageless brotherhood of ritual, acute simplicity, and constant worship . . . but also imperfection. There is an awareness, as one elder puts it that “even on Mount Athos we are humans walking every day on the razor’s edge.”