THE STORY – Chronicles the daredevil stuntman Ken Carter’s quest to execute a bold stunt of launching a rocket car across the St. Lawrence River from Canada to the United States in the 1970s, facing absurd challenges along the way.
THE CAST – Jay Baruchel, Ed Helms, Laurence Leboeuf, Ben Foster, Dan Bakkedahl, Joe Cobden & Marc Beaupré
THE TEAM – Michael Dowse (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 99 Minutes
It’s been more than four centuries since Cervantes wrote the story of a character that was a mix of bravery and madness, a man who would charge at windmills thinking them wild beasts, driven by a sense of adventure and the exploration of the limits of human capacity in order to achieve a kind of immortality. There’s a lot of Quixote in Canadian Ken Carter, a true-life outlier whose own Quixotic quest forms the spine of “The Stunt Driver.” Written and directed by Michael Dowse, and based in part on the 1981 National Film Board documentary “The Devil at Your Heels” by Robert Fortier, “The Stunt Driver” is a hybridized fictionalization of this “Mad Canadian” and his attempt to launch a rocket car a mile over the St. Lawrence River. Anchored by a sterling titular performance by Jay Baruchel, this provides a welcome reunion for the pair behind the sublime film “Goon.”
The film begins with a literal hypnotism, where both the lead character and the audience are encouraged to overcome our fears and explore the past. Through this structure, Dowse mines elements from Fortier’s film and grafts them onto newly shot footage, often replicating exact shots that echo the reality captured for the former project. At the same time, there’s another crew capturing the filming of the doc, making for a nested, Matryoshka-like structure with widescreen 35mm footage buttressed against grainy 16mm square aspect imagery, then flipping back and forth between elements captured decades ago and newly-filmed elements. The result is a fascinating portrait, one that continually dances between actuality and narrative necessity, truncating or consolidating when needed and allowing the surrealism of the truth to flourish when required. This allows Dowse to focus on character above spectacle, where the actual footage of Carter and his many attempts – some successful and other failures – are presented in all their glorious reality without the need to be so adherent with the character elements.
That’s not to say that Carter’s character is given short shrift. Baruchel uses all his gifts to bring the split personality of the stuntman to life, be it the more managerial, impresario aspect of Kenneth Gordon Polsjek, or the more wild, self-destructive alter-ego modality known to the world as Ken Carter. This bifurcation is touched upon in Fortier’s doc, but with Baruchel’s deft performance it helps humanize this divide, showing some welcome method behind the madness of all these attempts, while equally giving life to those times where it’s clear there’s not simply cowardice at play when the brakes are applied and the jump is delayed once again.
Fortier himself is a character within Dowse’s telling, and his affable portrayal by character actor Joe Cobden is one of the highlights of the restructuring of the tale. The partnership between subject and documentarian is often one that’s complex, or even fraught, and it’s the making of this original film that adds a more sophisticated, film-within-a-film hook to “The Stunt Driver’s” telling that elevates it from being some mere biopic of a mad adventurer.
Other characters are a mix of real life individuals and composite characters. Ben Foster has a terrific walk-on role as a skeptical, be-sweatered Evel Knievel, and Ed Helms shines at the quietly competent rocket car engineer Dick Keller. Laurence LeBoeuf’s role as Gloria would normally be a thankless one, but the film does well to provide dimentionality to what otherwise would often be a throwaway part. Marc Beaupré takes on the role reflecting other daredevils such as Kenny Powers (no relation to “Eastbound & Down,” alas), and injects a playful sense of a French Canadian cowboy as he makes his way in the shadow of Carter’s own achievements.
In Dowse’s telling, Carter is far more than simply a man on a mission – he’s a reflection of the anxieties of a country undergoing trauma and potential rupture, making his attempt nothing short of a patriotic necessity. Just as the Franco/Anglo divide in both Quebec and the rest of Canada is an underlying aspect throughout, so too is the overt notion of attempts to literally bridge via this stunt the invisible border between this country and our neighbor to the south. At a time where the political divides and posturings meant to separate the US from Canada are at their highest in generations, the seemly madcap attempts by Carter feel positively sane compared to the actual lunacy being expressed by certain world leaders.
As such, Carter’s Quixotic quest takes on a new impact in 2026 in a way that it could never have been predicted to do some four decades earlier. While the sense of zaniness and bone-crunching spectacle is fully intact in “The Stunt Driver’s” boisterous telling, it’s these other, more profound elements that elevate both the storyline and the impact of Carter and his legacy. For certain, this is a silly story with a underlying thread of tragedy woven throughout, yet despite the flash of flames coming from the outside of a large sedan, there’s subtlety at play here, making the film far more than simply the tale of a giant ramp and even bigger cojones, but instead a finely-drawn portrait of a character that is deserving of achieving the kind of immortality he long sought to achieve.
