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‘The Walk’ wows with every step (A)

The line between gimmicky and magic can be mighty fine, but Robert Zemeckis masters it like a seasoned pro in The Walk. He brings the World Trade Center towers back to life in vivid detail, right down to the rust on the roof beams. But he does something more, something deeply moving. He makes us see the skyscrapers through the eyes of a driven dreamer. And he allows us to feel that dreamer's euphoria at the same time we mourn what was forever lost that September morning 14 years ago.

The dream belongs to Philippe Petit (played by the ever-game Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a charmingly monomaniacal Frenchman who lives to walk the high wire. He has a circus mentor (Ben Kingsley, lord of the ambiguous European accent), a girlfriend (Charlotte Le Bon) and a best friend/official photographer (Ben Schwartz). He also has an unshakable ambition: to stretch his wire between the soon-to-be-completed Twin Towers and perform a death-defying walk.

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The first half of The Walk is pleasantly engaging, as Zemeckis dips into his bag of tricks and pulls out some nifty devices: transitions from black and white to color, dissolves from mock-ups of the towers to the real things, and other nimble fare. But that's all foreplay leading to what Petit calls "the coup," the grand performance with which he's obsessed.

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Charlotte Le Bon, left, as Annie and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit in "The Walk."
Charlotte Le Bon, left, as Annie and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit in "The Walk."(Takashi Seida / Sony Pictures Entertainment)

Two courses are served once The Walk hits downtown Manhattan, lovingly reimagined for the summer of 1974. The appetizer is the plotting of a caper, from the recruitment of a team of accomplices to laying out the details of an inspired criminal endeavor. The recruiting and planning zip along to a propulsive jazz score and a jocular camaraderie that would feel at home in one of the Ocean's Eleven movies. James Badge Dale does particularly strong work here as a fast-talking American accomplice whose easy gift of gab carries the crew past one checkpoint after another.

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But we all know what the main event is here, and when it arrives the emotional impact hits like a thunderclap. As Gordon-Levitt's Petit stands before the void, ready to take his first steps, we're struck by how eerily real the towers feel, as if some cosmic artist rewound reality to Sept. 10, 2001.

And then he goes out on the wire.

Zemeckis has been cinema's great populist illusionist since he took us Back to the Future and asked Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Sometimes his ploys carry a saccharine aftertaste (Forrest Gump); other gambits feel frosty (the motion-capture animation of The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol). But none of that can prepare you for the walk.

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Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petite in "The Walk."
Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petite in "The Walk."(Sony Pictures)

The camera seems to be everywhere at once but never in a hurry. It glides overhead, and brings us diving down to the buzzing New Yorkers below. More important, Zemeckis conjures an absolute suspension of disbelief. We feel we're watching a precocious daredevil prance between two impossibly high buildings, and we're struck anew by the fact that those buildings have ceased to be. It's one of the transcendent sequences in movie history, accentuated by the bliss of a man cheating death and our mourning of those who couldn't.

Man on Wire, the Oscar-winning documentary that chronicles the events of The Walk, reminds us that there's no video of the actual feat. Zemeckis seems to have taken this absence as a personal challenge, right down to the Imax 3-D format: You want images? I'll give you images.

You emerge from The Walk in a vertiginous daze of emotion, putty in the hands of a magician at the peak of his craft.

The Walk (A)

Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Rated PG (thematic elements involving perilous situations, some nudity, language, brief drug references and smoking). In English and French with English subtitles. At local Imax 3D theaters (wide release Oct. 9). 123 mins.