The viewer keeps waiting for “Tenzing,” the new bio-drama of the life of “the other man” to be the first to summit Mount Everest, to take a false step.

But director Jennifer Peedom comes from documentaries and she’s made films about the world’s highest peaks, the Sherpa porters and guides who help climbers ascend them and one particular “Miracle on Everest.”

She knows this world and the cost of “false steps” in it. And that becomes a great virtue of her feature film debut, a beautifully-shot, solid and sentimental life of Tenzing Norgay, the plucky guide, problem solver and Everest veteran who was with Edmund Hillary every step of the way in their 1953 “conquest” of the world’s highest mountain.

“Tenzing” is a lightly-fictionalized, rigidly-unconventional drama painted in time-honored strokes, often letting its beautiful settings lift it above its formula. It’s modest, like its hero, showing us the Everest climb accented by flashbacks telling us of its intrepid climber’s impoverished childhood and dogged lifelong obsession with “getting to know” the mountain that Tibetans and Sherpas call Chomolangma, “Goddess Mother of the World.”

Screen newcomer Samdrup Dorje Lama affectingly plays Tenzing as a boy, a yak herder who stumbled into some “foreigners” once, one of whom happened to be the famed Alpinist and doomed Everest climber George Mallory (Johnny Flynn). Tenzing’s fixation on Chomolangma is traced to that day.

Fresh-off a failed Swiss effort to climb Everest, the adult Tenzing (Genden Phuntsok) negotiates his position with the new British-led attempt led by Col. Hunt (Willem Dafoe, perfect). No, the 1950s Brits haven’t given up their “white man’s burden” view of brown, black, red and yellow folk. But there’ll be none of this “just a porter” business for an Everest veteran like Tenzing. He holds out until the condescending white guys accept him as part of the climbing team, and “Head Sherpa,” the one who ensures the Sherpa support team gets tents, oxygen bottles, food and everything else to the various base camps higher and higher up Mount Everest.

We get a glimpse of Norgay’s people skills as he keeps the peace between sometimes resentful Sherpas and imperious Brits doing their damnedest not to come off as straight-up racists.

Flashbacks show us the trials Norgay endured — orphaned, raised outside of his tribe, “He’s not even Sherpa!” — in another country, scorned when “our servant boy” tries to court and marry his childhood crush, Dawa (Phurba Tashi Sherpa plays her as an adult), rebuffed when he first attempts to win a job on an earlier Everest expedition.

In the best “boy that made the man” tradition, it’s easy to connect the kid’s persistence, pluck and creative problem-solving with the adult who will be the keystone to the first successful climb to The Top of the World.

His fellow porters and Sherpas can warn him about “getting any big ideas” (in Sherpa, and in English) about who the Brits regard as equals. But one climber, Ed Hillary (Tom Hiddleston), is more color blind than the other team members. He recognizes “merit” and the “meritocracy” of this attempt. He’s also treated with scorn by the Limeys.

“Lovely to imagine a ‘kiwi’ (New Zealander) at the summit,” one less-than-Great Brit cracks.

Naturally, Hillary figures out who is best qualified to summit and teams up with Tenzing.

The script, inspired by a Ed Douglas biography of Tenzing Norgay, may be lightly fictionalized, giving the viewer some pause at the more “kumbaya” moments of fraternity, sportsmanship, heroism and seeing past racism. But as almost all of this checks out — Hillary became Norgay’s lifelong friend and insisted on the shared credit of their “summit together” climb — the “feel good” parts of the story are honest.

The Brits stand on a crevasse that turned them back the day before and wonder why they’ve marched back to this “impassible” obstacle.

“What’s happening?” they ask the Kiwi.

“Tenzing,” Hillary drolly replies as Norgay rigs a rope to cross the chasm. “Tenzing’s happening.”

That’s wholesome, gee whiz quality of the historical account is one of the reasons this hasn’t been the “Everest” story Hollywood has fallen over itself to tell. There’s less drama — conflict within the “underpaid” Sherpa ranks (Tenzin Jigmey plays Norgay’s most contemptuous Sherpa rival), unrealistic expectations by the team leader, fears of an “early monsoon” — and less tragedy than in the many efforts to reach the peak before and since.

Peedom’s most artful touches are the flashbacks, the last of which cross the screen as we’re seeing what Norgay saw — the climbing boots that he stares down at as he moves one exhausted step at a time up the last harrowing stretch to the top.

Our director’s been to Everest before. She knows where the “epic” is in this epic tale, and keeps Chomolangma in the frame, up close or as the most striking backdrop on Earth.

There have been more harrowing “Everest” quests and films of or about those quests. “Tenzing” is simply and straightforwardly the first about the unassuming but heroic local man who made this extreme climbing destination possible by doing the impossible — paving the way with his “Kiwi” friend.

Rating: PG, mild peril

Cast: Genden Phuntsok, Tom Hiddleston,
Caitríona Balfe, Johnny Flynn,
Samdrup Dorje Lama, Tenzin Jigmey and Willem Dafoe

Credits: Directed by Jennifer Peedom, scripted by Luke Davies, inspired by the Ed Douglas biography of Tenzing Norgay. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 2:06