Puppet interweaves a broad look at the fraught history of American puppetry (its marginalization as children's theater and its sudden explosion as high art) with an intimate thread following Dan Hurlin, a downtown artist who created a complex puppet work called "Disfarmer" based on the life of a Depression-era portrait photographer. Hurlin's struggle to mount the show has an eerie parallel to his subject whose stunning body of work was very nearly lost forever.