The Walk centers around one act, Phillipe Petit’s 1974 high wire walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, which Hollywood mainstay and visual effects pioneer Robert Zemeckis enlists the full range of movie magic to recreate. It’s a story that can be told verbally in one sentence, but to see IMAX 3D used to convey the sensory thrills of the act – the dizzying heights, the whistling wind, the astonished faces below and the strange peacefulness of New York from 110 stories up – is another thing altogether. The Walk is refreshing in that the technical wizardry of Hollywood is being used to portray something joyous and awe-inspiring instead of death and destruction, but unfortunately, the walk itself is only the climax of the film and the shopworn Hollywood approach to putting this event into a narrative is less satisfying.

The first act of the film introduces us to Petit (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in Paris, scraping out a living as a street performer and learning the craft of high wire walking. It’s a mildly amusing if derivative origin story, as we see Petit fight with his family over his dream, have some low stakes run-ins with the law, meet his thinly realized love interest Annie (Charlotte Le Bon), and his gruff but lovable mentor Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley). When Petit sees a picture of the World Trade Center nearing completion in a magazine, he immediately wants to string his wire there and focuses all of his efforts on assembling a team that can help make that happen. In New York, the film takes on the flavor of a heist movie as Petit designs and executes a plan to get a team on the roof of each tower, string the cable across, and meet his dream high above the streets of New York.

The first two thirds of the film feel glossy and mechanical, populated by stereotypes there to move the story along without adding any depth or insight. Initially, Petit, played by Gordon-Levitt with a silly accent and impish manner, is hard to take seriously, but that ends up somewhat working in the narrative’s favor as other characters find him this way too, only to be shocked by his unswerving commitment to realizing his impossible dream. The problem with both Gordon-Levitt’s capable performance and the narrative leading up to the walk is that they try to explain something that is wonderful precisely because it is so inexplicable. Many characters in the film have difficulty describing the act – is it a stunt, a work of art, a crime? Even Petit seems uninterested or unable in putting it into words; he says, “there is no why” and the one word he returns to is “life.” And whatever his walk was, it truly was life-affirming in its sheer senselessness, daring, and beauty.

Both through superhero movies and real-world disasters, shots of awe-struck city-dwellers looking to the sky have become sadly commonplace, but here, New Yorkers are gazing at the sky in wonder, not at somebody in tights with “powers” or at some act of horror, but at a fellow human expanding our sense of what is possible. The onlookers seem somehow revitalized or redeemed by what they’ve seen, just as the film’s climax redeems the overly broad events that led to it. Zemeckis has resurrected the towers to show the act that, as Annie says, “gave them a soul.”