Summary
A weather-beaten stunt pilot, once toasted as the barnstorming marvel of the roaring skies, limps back to the air-circus circuit after a spectacular crash that shattered both his spine and his nerve. In the suffocating dust of a Kansas fairground he meets a carnival sharpshooter whose cigarette embers glow like runway lights; together they cobble a rickety biplane from war-surplus ribs and bedsheet wings, gambling on one last altitude record that could either redeem or erase them. Their odyssey drags them across drought-scorched fields, moonshine towns, and a river of unpaid debts, pursued by a cigar-chomping promoter who wants to franchise Cyclone’s rebirth as a macabre sideshow and by a tabloid vamp intent on scripting a tragedy she can photograph. When the climactic storm front rolls in—black as a prosecutor’s robe—the rebuilt engine coughs, the wing fabric ripples like a dying flag, and the cockpit becomes a confessional where every past cowardice is weighed against the single act of climbing back into the sky. The finale is not a triumph but a tremor: the plane disappears into bruised clouds, leaving only a spiral of smoke and a woman on the ground who keeps pulling the trigger of an empty flare gun, unsure whether she is saluting or surrendering.
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