One of the daredevils in “Steep,” a documentary about extreme skiing, insists he is not hooked on the adrenaline rush of this death-defying sport. His denial is hard to believe.

In one scene after another of this movie, written and directed by Mark Obenhaus, skiers hurtle down slopes at angles of 55 degrees or greater and leap off precipices into the unknown. The tiniest miscalculation, we are repeatedly told, could result in death.

The sport’s practitioners — addicts might be a better word — would rather talk about how extreme skiing puts them totally in the moment and gives them an appreciation of life so acute it makes this sport, which has a high fatality rate, worth pursuing at all costs. There is a lot of mystical mumbo jumbo about how mountains are living, breathing things whose moods must be gauged before you venture onto their slopes; on a bad day a grouchy mountain can bite back.

Behind it all is the same competitive spirit that disciples of religious cults dish out to the uninitiated. The proselytizer fervently believes that he or she (but usually he) has a richer life than his unenlightened audience. That may be why “Steep” so often sounds like a promotional film.

The movie, photographed in high-definition video by Erich Roland, is an undeniably impressive visual spectacle that follows the sport from Wyoming to France, British Columbia, Iceland and Alaska. Like that of its sister sport, surfing, extreme skiing has a history of one feat topping another as techniques are developed and challenges devised.

The worldwide search for the highest wave is paralleled by the search for the steepest, wildest, most dangerous slopes and for perfect snow. Perfection is to be found, according to the movie, in the extreme-skiing mecca of Valdez, Alaska, where the white stuff has the texture of velvet.

“Steep” arbitrarily begins its history with a lone descent of Bill Briggs in 1971 on Grand Teton mountain in Wyoming. His accomplishment, witnessed by no one but attested to by aerial photographs of his ski tracks, was all the more remarkable because he was born without a hip joint, and multiple surgeries had left him with a limp.

Since then a widening search for adventure has sparked the popularity of what is called big mountain skiing, two of whose hubs, visited by the movie, are Chamonix, in the French Alps, and Valdez. The sport’s popularity has been spread by video, with Greg Stump’s 1988 film, “The Blizzard of Aahhh’s,” cited as a seminal work.

We meet the sport’s macho clown, Glen Plake, a wild man with a two-foot high Mohawk, and its composed, apparently fearless female virtuoso, Ingrid Backstrom. Pushing the limits of extreme skiing is Shane McConkey, who has pioneered ski basing: skiing off a cliff at full speed carrying a parachute.

The most consistent presence in the film is Doug Coombs, who in 1991 won the first World Extreme Ski Championship in Valdez. With his wife, Emily, he founded Valdez Heli-Ski Guides, which made the Chugach Range in Alaska a magnet for skiers, who are dropped off by helicopter on mountain peaks from which they descend at lightning speeds.

In the film Mr. Coombs, who died while skiing with friends on April 3, 2006, reflects on the risks of his sport and sounds resigned to his luck eventually running out. To the detached observer the line between this cheerful fatalism and flirting with suicide seems imperceptible.

STEEP

Opens nationwide on Friday.

Written and directed by Mark Obenhaus; narrated by Peter Krause; director of photography, Erich Roland; edited by Peter R. Livingston Jr.; music by Anton Sanko; produced by Jordan Kronick and Gabrielle Tenenbaum; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.