With rave advance reviews and a Best Directing Award for World Documentary at Sundance, where indieWIRE critics voted it first among documentaries, James Marsh’s Project Nim bids fair to surpass the critical and box-office success of Man on Wire.

It is, in fact, akin to that latter 2009 Oscar winner in two aspects. Although billed as non-fiction, both are not a hundred percent so, as along with archival, video and 16mm home-movie footage, they rely on re-creations and actors playing real-life people (and animals, what with an “animatronic chimpanzee,” puppeteer and sculptor) without indicators as to where the spontaneous actual ends and the imagined, scripted posed begins. Second, they are “broken-backed”-- not necessarily a demerit, as witness Huck Finn and Les Damoiselles d’Avignon -- the former in ultimately uncovering Twin Tower-wirewalker Philippe Petit’s unlovely egotism that estranged him from admiring associates and lovers; and Project Nim in morphing into an animal-rights plea with sentimental music and in later revealing not only the “animal” nature of animals but the unlovely motivations and power plays (a recurring word) of our featherless biped-political animal species.

Titular “project” indicates man’s supposedly rational interest in titular “Nim,” the chimpanzee (1973-2000) punningly christened Nim Chimpsky -- this was, after all, about language if not strictly linguistics -- taken at birth from mother Carolyn just like six previous offspring, and placed with the moneyed, hippy-ish New York-brownstone family of Stephanie (Reagan Leonard) and poet husband Wer LaFarge and their seven children from previous unions.

But this is not only the life story of the celebrated chimp, though that, too -- birth and breast feeding, Pampers and potty training, “sibling” rivalries, terrible twos tantrums, teachers, socialization, sexual stirrings, latter-day companions and possible fatherhood. All told, it reflects more the humans who react to, and with, the being who shares ninety-eight percent of our genes. Those who would nurture, study, profit from or exploit that creature come off a rather sorry lot.

Simians are anatomically incapable of speech. Accordingly, the goal was to teach the subject sign language so as to communicate and fathom his thoughts. But Einstein cautioned that “if we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research, would it?” and Professor Herbert Terrace entered the project without having thought it through on scientific or moral grounds. Indeed, it is odd that that Columbia University behavioral psychologist allowed the filmmaker to approach him, for he is the villain of the piece even more than New York University LEMSIP lab researchers. Arrogant, patriarchal, manipulative, and publicity-seeking, he nowhere considers the repercussions on those involved and, further, takes advantage for a series of liaisons with female student volunteers and draftees, such moral turpitude a cause for academic termination.

He is the worst of the lot because, while they may act badly, most of the others do so out of weakness, confusion or pettiness, and sexual entanglements arise, shift and dry up while humans become emotionally involved with Nim and thus possessive, demanding, and unobjective.

SPOILER ALERT

Nim masters a vocabulary of some hundred-twenty signals-for-words, though the significance of such non-grammatical acquisition remains debated. The anthropoid ape’s manipulativeness, territorial and other possessiveness, and material demands become problems, unforeseen and insoluble. Unpredictable and physically powerful, with rages and potentially fatal biting attacks, he is shuttled from one place to another, to a landscaped university mansion in Riverdale, the Bronx, thence back to his Oklahoma research-center birthplace, from which he is sold into university medical research, only to be supposedly rescued to Cleveland Amory’s Black Beauty Ranch in Texas.

Like the very project itself, this manmade biography says more about man and woman than about the being they nurture among themselves and only secondarily study. Anthropomorphization, making animals human in projecting ourselves onto them, is the stuff of novels and cartoons but still reveals much about our desires, insecurities and wished-for goodness. Graduate student Bob Ingersoll is alone in the film in relating to Nim unselfishly, treating God’s creature as an equal on its own terms.

Animal activists should push for public awareness of Project Nim and its sourcebook, Elizabeth Hess’ Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human. That alone would fulfill Aristotle’s ethical injunction that “every activity, artistic or scientific . . . has for its object the attainment of some good.”

(Released by Roadside Attractions and HBO Documentary Films. Rated “PG-13” by MPAA.)