Gripping Doc About Rogue Climber-Photographer

Drift, a documentary about free solo skyscraper climber-photographer Isaac Wright, aka Drift, is so obviously destined to be the precursor of a future biopic that its interviewees are already discussing that outcome in the film. It happens about halfway through, when one of Wright’s lawyers recounts telling his client’s chief nemesis, police officer Jeff Ruberg, that when that biopic gets made one day, Ruberg will inevitably be the villain of the story (and not a cuddly, Tom-Hanks-in-Catch-Me-if-You-Can kind of bad guy).

It’s not clear if that was the decisive conversation that changed Wright’s fate in court, but director Deon Taylor lets it hang in the air as if it was — one of several canny sleights of cinema here that makes this doc so entertaining, even if it’s often also a bit hokey and sentimental. Luckily, the protagonist is a young man with a moving and complicated backstory and a photogenic, wonky-toothed smile. He’s an instantly likable guy who seems to instinctively know exactly how to present himself best, nonchalant but never cocky, for the camera, be it his own or one operated by Taylor’s crew.

Having built his fame through social media and then parlayed his skills at climbing vertiginous structures, photography and drone operation into a lucrative art career — one partly built on non-fungible tokens — Wright has a narrative that’s also a quintessentially 21st-century success story. This is a Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches, hooray-for-capitalism parable for a generation that has no idea who Horatio Alger was.

Taylor and his editors, Martin Biehn and Kevin Hibbard, adroitly pitch back and forth between telling Wright’s backstory and getting across the audacity of what he does for a living, drawing on the heart-stopping, stomach-sinking footage Wright shoots himself. Anyone who suffers from vertigo or any kind of fear of heights should be well-advised to watch with caution, and personally there were times the film made me, a minor acrophobic, feel the need to avert my eyes and search my purse for some Rescue Remedy. Wright’s main schtick is to climb as far as humanly possible up to the top of iconic buildings without a harness or ropes and then photograph his feet (usually clad in Vans, getting product placement already) in super-high-resolution so that the ant-like cars on the ground or far horizon makes it clear he’s usually more than a thousand feet up in the air.

To access these heights, Wright uses his self-taught skills at lockpicking or simply slipping in through unlocked doors and never gets permission to risk his life from the buildings’ managers. That’s how he ends up pursued by the police across various state and county lines and eventually incarcerated, first in Arizona and then in his home state of Ohio while the aforementioned lawyers work to set him free. It all unfolds in around 2020-21, with the death of George Floyd infusing every confrontation between the police and a Black man (Wright is biracial) with an extra freight of fear and distrust. The fact that Wright is also a veteran, recovering from PTSD, adds another wrinkle to the story; in a way it works for him given the general thank-you-for-your-service gratitude people feel toward veterans, but also against him because his familiarity with weapons supposedly presented a further risk.

Either way, the distinct cultural disconnect between Wright’s art praxis and police officers’ prejudices leads to profound misunderstandings. That said, it doesn’t help that officer Ruberg declined to tell his side of the story, while the filmmakers are clearly unabashedly on Wright’s side. It’s never once mentioned, for instance, that if he fell on someone from such massive heights the consequences would be devastating not just to him, obviously, or whomever he fell on, but on all the bystanders unlucky enough to witness the event — something some viewers may never be able to quite put out of their minds while they’re supposed to be reveling in the extreme daring of it all.

But for now, if that future biopic ends just where this documentary does, it should make for a great nail-biter of an action-driven drama, an underdog story with an unconventional hero ready-made to offer advice to the stunts team.