‘Free Solo': Daredevil accomplishment, film

Showcasing a dedication and prowess that seems superhuman, “Free Solo,” Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin's invigorating portrait of the free climber Alex Honnold, is an easy sell to extreme sports enthusiasts. More sedentary viewers, though - perhaps less focused on the technical niceties of defying gravity - might discover something arguably even more fascinating in this layered documentary: a cautionary study of what can happen when you don't hug your children.

Honnold, now 33, would eventually teach himself to hug, at least as it applies to human interaction. He has always seemed to know how to embrace a rock face, to jam fingers and toes into the tiniest of cracks and scamper upward with near-mystical ease. Rejecting company, ropes or pitons (except the occasional strays left behind by more conventional climbers), he has completed more than 1,000 solitary ascents and is reputed to be the greatest surviving free-soloist. In a sport where a rogue wind or a single, startled bird can send you hurtling to your death, not too many practitioners live long enough to earn a tribute like this one.

As anyone familiar with the directors' 2015 mountaineering movie, “Meru,” will know, heart-stopping camera angles and crisp, vertigo-inducing vistas are a given. Yet this husband-and-wife team also have a knack for exposing, without exploiting, a little of the man beneath the apparent madness. And as Honnold, all eyes and ears and boyish eagerness, brightly speaks of an emotionally isolated childhood and the once “bottomless pit of self-loathing” that has driven him upward, his meticulous preparations to scale El Capitan in Yosemite National Park take on a ritualistic cast. To the uninitiated, the intricate markings in his obsessively maintained climbing journal appear as mysterious as runes cast to keep him safe.

It seems fitting that the veteran climber Tommy Caldwell, dozens of whose friends have died (which an in memoriam montage corroborates), describes climbing with Honnold as “a vice.” Karate-kicking across a gap on something appropriately called “The Boulder Problem,” or dangling by a fingernail over a void, he gives us plenty of opportunities to follow the lead of one of the cameramen and turn our heads away.

This calm acceptance of death is one that thrives on having no attachment to the ground; so when he acquires a serious girlfriend, the sunny Sanni McCandless, his newly tethered emotions are as much of a challenge as the minimally-appointed van he has lived in for almost a decade. It's bad enough living with a human fly; only a woman in love would tolerate a home with no bathroom.

Despite a somewhat soft middle section, “Free Solo” is an engaging study of a perfect match between passion and personality. Though resisting psychoanalysis, the directors watch as an MRI of Honnold's brain, perhaps unsurprisingly, suggests one that requires supernormal levels of stimulation. His concerned mother, Dierdre Wolownick (one of whose favorite sayings, Honnold recalls, was “Almost doesn't count”), wonders if he has Asperger's syndrome, but the man himself is unfazed by speculation.

“Nobody achieves anything great by being happy and cozy,” he says, reveling in his perilous talents.

Maybe McCandless can convince him otherwise, but I somehow doubt it.