On the morning of August 7, 1974, Philippe Petit stepped onto a wire strung illegally between the roofs of the World Trade Center's twin towers and walked, knelt, and lay down on it, 1,350 feet above New York. James Marsh's film reconstructs how he got there, treating the stunt as a heist: Petit and his crew of friends and strangers smuggling cable and rigging past guards, posing as construction workers, and rehearsing the plan for months after Petit first saw a magazine sketch of the still-unfinished towers years earlier. Interviews with Petit himself and the accomplices who helped him, including his girlfriend Annie Allix and photographer Jean-Louis Blondeau, sit alongside black-and-white reenactments and archival footage from Petit's earlier illegal walks at Notre Dame and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The film builds tension like a caper even though the outcome is known, and it never mentions the towers' later destruction, keeping its focus entirely on one morning when a man walked between two buildings for no reason except that he wanted to.