Philippe Petit, a self-taught French highwire artist, falls in love with the unfinished World Trade Center towers and daydreams of walking the cloud-level span between them. Together with an international band of comrades, girlfriends and stoners, he perfects his craft, tests his will on lesser structures, invents a disguise to access the buildings and touches heaven during an unauthorized fifty-minute balancing act, far above the bustling morning sidewalk commute.

There's a sense of faded liberty and wild west potential to this caper, the kind of thing that couldn't possibly happen in today's world of digital surveillance and trigger-happy security. Here's a man from the other end of the world, inspired by a puff piece in the paper, who managed to accomplish a lunatic notion by employing persistence, elbow grease and a few flimsy counterfeit work orders. His is a tale of DIY wonder, if a little inflated and aggrandized by the telling. In the absence of archival footage (a few stunning photographs provide the only record of his feat), we're left to gape over TV grade re-enactments and breathless recollections from a number of winking, grinning sources. It's a fantastical story, but the lack of footage is disappointing, and Petit's voiceover sometimes feels a little on the unreliable side. He is, after all, a born showman.