"Stepping into the Sky"

On the morning of Aug. 7, 1974, after months of preparation and years of dreaming, a French daredevil named Philippe Petit stepped into the sky above Lower Manhattan. For almost 45 minutes he ambled back and forth on a metal cable strung between the towers of the World Trade Center, a feat of tightrope walking that, according to a New York Police Department sergeant who recounted Petit's act of physical poetry in dry press conference prose, would more aptly be described as dancing.

For many years after, Petit's stunt was a cherished footnote in the annals of New York history. The destruction of the twin towers in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, revived the memory of that earlier, aesthetic assault on the buildings, which is now the subject of "Man on Wire," James Marsh's thorough, understated and altogether enthralling documentary. The film is being released this summer in Britain and the United States and in the Netherlands in February. Wisely, Marsh, who based his film on a book Petit published in 2002, never alludes to Sept. 11. That would have been both distracting and redundant, since it's impossible, while watching a movie so intimate in its attention to the towers, not to be haunted by thoughts of their fate.