Wire to wire

A documentary about a towering act of daring proves a spine-tingling memorial to recklessness as art

His World Trade Center walk is just the most famous of Philippe Petit's accomplishments. (Jean-Louis Blondean/Polaris Images)

"Man on Wire" is a documentary of ghosts. It commemorates a young man who now is old, suspended between two skyscrapers that no longer exist, on a wire that from a distance simply isn't there. Can we believe our eyes? Did this actually happen?

Yes, in a vanished world. Early on the morning of Aug. 7, 1974, a 24-year-old French aerialist named Philippe Petit stepped onto a cable stretched between the North and South towers of the recently completed World Trade Center in Manhattan. He crossed back and forth eight times in 45 minutes, occasionally lying down and kneeling as he balanced a quarter mile above the earth.

Whenever New York City policemen reached out to grab him, Petit would pirouette away. One of the cops, speaking to the press later in awed tones, described him as a "tightrope dancer, because you couldn't call him a walker." In the photos, the young daredevil wears a blissful, concentrated grin.

The stunt was illegal, obviously - you can't exactly get a permit for this sort of thing - and the preparations had the urgent, scrupulously planned dimensions of a bank heist. That's how director James Marsh films them, too, employing hazy black-and-white reenactments to dramatize Petit and his group of French friends and American sympathizers smuggling their equipment to the upper floors of the Tower buildings on the night of Aug. 6.

"Man on Wire" periodically backs up to fill in the spaces of Petit's childhood and his early acts of high-wire guerrilla theater - the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge - but the film keeps looping back to the slow run-up to the Trade Center walk, waiting for the sun to rise over Manhattan. Goosed by the repurposed minimalism of Michael Nyman's music on the soundtrack (if you've seen any Peter Greenaway movies, you'll be having déjà vu), the suspense is palpable and occasionally pokey. When Petit and an accomplice hide from a security guard under a tarp, the hours pass by like hours.

Interspersed are modern-day interviews with Petit and his band of outsiders, and the contrast between then and now couldn't be more striking. In the early-'70s footage that preserves the planning sessions and backyard wirewalking, the conspirators are all hippie innocents toying with a beautiful, enormous idea. Today, they're white-haired or balding, smiling and occasionally weeping with reminiscence, and to a man, they know better. The one female on board, Petit's then-girlfriend Annie Allix, is a silent worshipful presence in the old films and very much her own woman today.

But you get the sense that people either gave in to Petit or kept as far away as possible. He seems to have had a young man's intensely graceful monomania, the sort that creates acolytes willing to follow him off a cliff. So many things could have gone wrong in Manhattan and yet it all went right. Seen today at almost 60, Petit is a chattery trickster - an aging elf - and he burbles over with self-indulgent pride as he recalls his dance with death, scorning larger meaning. He could do it, so he did it: a tautology of acrobatics. It takes a great egotist to think the Twin Towers were built solely for him to walk between.

They were much more, of course: a tourist attraction, a civic landmark, an architectural eyesore, and finally, a tomb in absentia. "Man on Wire" never once raises the subject of 9/11, and it doesn't need to. Everything we know forms a huge, ghastly hole at the film's center. In a sense, Petit memorialized the towers 27 years before they were destroyed. His walk gave form to the profound psychic space that can surround mere buildings.

So it was art, even if he insists it was. There were no movie cameras on the roof that morning, and when the time comes for Petit to step onto the cable, Marsh recreates the moment with a collage of still photographs. Ambient noise drops away and Satie's "Gymnopédie No. 1" rises up, each delicate note seeming to match the wirewalker's footsteps. The movie, the city, the audience holds its breath. The sight is magical and heartbreaking in equal measure. Look, the movie says: Where so many would fall, a man walks on air.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation.