Ken “The Mad Canadian” Carter may willingly strap himself into vehicles designed to leave the ground, but don’t call him a daredevil. For Carter, the distinction matters. What he does isn’t supposed to be reckless. It requires engineering, preparation and an almost irrational faith that every calculation will keep him alive. It’s that increasingly fragile divide between courage and stupidity that gives Michael Dowse’s The Stunt Driver its comic energy and eventual melancholy.
Inspired by Robert Fortier’s documentary The Devil at Your Heels, the film stars Jay Baruchel as Carter, a Canadian stunt driver determined to accomplish something even Evel Knievel couldn’t: launching a rocket-powered car across more than a mile of water between Canada and the United States.
To make the seemingly impossible possible, Carter enlists reluctant engineer Dick Keller (Ed Helms). Their incompatibility is immediately amusing: Carter wants someone to tell him how the jump can happen; Keller keeps explaining all the ways it could kill him.
What initially appears to be another of Carter’s outsized schemes gradually consumes years of his life. Money becomes involved, deadlines shift and promoter Dick Wilkins (Dan Bakkedahl) demands results. Every delay makes abandoning the stunt harder. Carter hasn’t merely announced what he intends to do; he has constructed his identity around eventually doing it.
Dowse has plenty of fun with this masculine ecosystem, where the men surrounding Carter simultaneously encourage his madness and try to prevent him from dying because of it. Marc Beaupré adds further bravado as cocky protégé Danny Lafortune, while Ben Foster’s Evel Knievel hangs over Carter’s ambitions as a nemesis who doesn’t appear nearly as invested in their supposed rivalry.
Baruchel is essential to balancing the comedy with something more vulnerable. Beneath Carter’s swagger is a man increasingly terrified by the consequences of his own mythology. He can withstand physical punishment, but admitting he’s frightened is another matter. Baruchel gradually allows that fear to bleed through, particularly as Carter searches for circumstances beyond his control that might provide an acceptable reason not to climb into the car.
That contradiction becomes the film’s most compelling idea. Carter desperately wants the jump to happen, yet part of him seems relieved whenever something prevents it. Walking away would keep him alive, but it would also mean living beneath the shadow of what might have been.
Laurence Leboeuf provides welcome emotional grounding as Carter’s wife, Gloria, while Helms is particularly effective as Keller’s investment evolves beyond professional curiosity. He doesn’t necessarily believe Carter should attempt the jump, but once it becomes clear he intends to proceed regardless, keeping him alive becomes its own mission.
Dowse’s most interesting decision, however, is refusing to treat The Devil at Your Heels merely as source material. Fortier becomes a character himself, played by Joe Cobden, with the aspect ratio shifting between the film’s widescreen reality and the tighter frame of his documentary camera. We aren’t simply watching Carter’s story recreated; we’re watching how that story was captured and subsequently became legend.
It’s a welcome layer in what is otherwise a fairly conventional biopic. For all the eccentricity of its subject, The Stunt Driver follows a familiar trajectory, and its accumulation of setbacks can occasionally stall the momentum. Its shifts between broad comedy and bruised introspection aren’t always seamless either.
Yet Dowse finds something affecting in the psychological toll of Carter’s ambition. This is an industry where audiences want to see someone flirt with catastrophe while desperately hoping catastrophe never arrives. Every successful stunt makes Carter remarkable, but it also demands that whatever comes next be bigger.
The Stunt Driver may not reinvent the sports biopic, but Dowse’s affection for his subject and Baruchel’s committed performance give it an unexpectedly tender streak. What starts as a funny portrait of one man’s ludicrous ambition gradually becomes something sadder: a man so determined to prove he can fly that he can no longer give himself permission to stay on the ground.
THREE AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
The Stunt Driver is screening in theatres across North America from September 25th, 2026.
