The Stunt Driver takes a story already built for the big screen and asks a sensible question: what happens when the person who needs an audience more than safety gets a project too huge to control? Its answer is visually elaborate, intermittently strange, and far less propulsive than the real-life documentary it revisits.
Directed and written by Michael Dowse, the Canada-Ireland production casts Jay Baruchel as Canadian stunt driver Ken Carter, a daredevil associated with an impossible-sounding ambition: launching a rocket-powered vehicle across a mile-long gap over the St. Lawrence River. The failed five-year push toward that stunt was chronicled in 1981’s The Devil at Your Heels. Dowse’s new 99-minute film draws on that documentary, adds material drawn from interviews and previously unused footage, and tries to make a case that the existing record did not fully explain Carter’s compulsive hunger for recognition.
There is a strong movie lurking in that premise. Carter’s undertaking required a 90-foot ramp, difficult engineering, financial backing, media savvy, and a willingness to push past the many people telling him that catastrophe may be the most likely outcome. Yet The Stunt Driver has an awkward relationship with the earlier film. It painstakingly recreates portions of the documentary and intercuts genuine archival material with dramatic scenes, but the recreation often feels less alive than the footage that inspired it.
A stuntman powered by applause
The movie introduces Carter in a manner designed to immediately establish his central contradiction. After a stunt goes wrong and leaves him hurt, he still worries about the spectators leaving. Even while being carried away on a stretcher, he pleads for the crowd to remain. For Carter, danger is not merely an occupational hazard or a route to a personal record; it is a means of becoming visible to people.
Baruchel gives Carter a larger-than-life theatricality. His version of the driver is a loud, eccentric self-promoter who treats the need to jump as practically self-explanatory because people like him when he does it. That can be a compellingly uncomfortable trait, especially when the story links his desire for public approval to class resentment and insecurity. A rediscovered radio interview in which Carter was hypnotized gives Dowse a real-world opening to probe vulnerability and fear that the documentary had not accessed in the same way.
But the expanded psychological portrait remains narrow. The film returns repeatedly to Carter’s need to be loved without substantially deepening it, and the heightened dialogue makes the character feel further removed from the more low-key individual visible in archival footage. At times, Baruchel’s vocal choices give Carter an unexpectedly Nixon-like flavor, which adds another layer of oddness rather than clarifying the man’s emotional makeup. A final dissolve between the actor and the real Carter makes that distance impossible to ignore.
The crew around the jump
Carter’s dream naturally requires a group of people willing to turn it into a practical operation. Ed Helms plays engineer Dick Keller, while Dan Bakkedahl appears as sports agent Bill Wilkins. Marc Beaupré plays Danny Lafortune, a Québécois protégé and hype man who supplies comic energy around the project. Laurence Leboeuf plays Carter’s wife, Gloria, though the role largely confines her to the familiar biopic position of standing at the edge of the action, worrying as the man at the center makes increasingly perilous decisions.
Ben Foster also appears as Evel Knievel, positioned as a rival to Carter. The film amplifies Canadian-versus-American antagonism, making Carter an especially fervent patriot and framing Knievel as a provocative American presence. That approach connects Carter’s showmanship to contemporary tensions around trade and national identity, but it can feel imposed rather than organically developed from the material.
One especially precise bit of mimicry comes from Joe Cobden as The Devil at Your Heels director Bob Fortier. The performance captures the cadence and texture of a 1970s documentarian with unusual specificity. It is an interesting reminder that a film about a documentary has two sets of characters to recreate: the people caught up in the stunt and the people attempting to record what was happening.
Fact, adaptation, and a notable alteration
Dowse’s film is not simply a scene-for-scene dramatization. Beyond the additional personal material and the final stretch addressing Carter’s life after the attempted jump, it makes a conspicuous change to the story’s supporting cast. The American driver who took Carter’s place in the source history was named Kenny Powers. In The Stunt Driver, that person’s name and characterization are altered into the Québécois comic figure Lafortune.
The change is understandable on a practical level: the name Kenny Powers carries a pop-culture association that could easily pull some viewers out of the period story. Still, shifting the character’s nationality also sidesteps an avenue the movie might have used to make its American rivalry more structurally meaningful. It leaves the anti-American rhetoric feeling selective, particularly since the narrative is otherwise eager to make Carter’s nationalism part of his persona.
That tension underlines the challenge of adapting a documentary about a real personality. A fiction film can reshape chronology, invent connective tissue, and emphasize themes. However, when it repeatedly places recreations beside recognizable archive material, every new embellishment invites comparison. The Stunt Driver wants the tactile authority of the historical record while giving itself room for a more expressive, emotionally explanatory portrait. It does not always reconcile those goals.
The movie’s clearest victory is its format work
The production’s most convincing achievement is its visual design. Cinematographer Sara Mishara works across multiple formats, including digital photography, 16mm, and 35mm stock, to give the film distinct visual registers. For much of the first 80 minutes, scenes recreating the documentary are shown in an academy-ratio frame, while added dramatic context arrives in widescreen. A third aspect ratio comes into play at the climax.
The formal idea is easy to read. The archival documentary is one layer of truth, but not the entire story; the wider frame opens a more polished, subjective space intended to reveal what the original footage could not. The final visual shift aims to sharpen Carter’s anxiety. Mishara makes all these modes look plausible for their period while ensuring each remains handsomely composed, lit, and colored on its own terms.
It is meticulous craft, not a novelty for novelty’s sake. The varying stocks and frames help differentiate observation from dramatization and history from remembered emotion. In a film centered on a stunt driver who needs to control the public image of his own danger, the struggle over which image is “real” has obvious thematic weight. Unfortunately, the movie’s pace does not consistently match its visual ingenuity. Scenes can feel like illustrations of a point already made, and the momentum that ought to build toward a monumental attempted leap often softens into repetition.
Why the documentary’s shadow is so long
The new movie’s fundamental problem is not that it honors The Devil at Your Heels; a dramatization should acknowledge the work that preserved this story. The problem is that it spends so much energy recreating and enlarging the documentary that it seldom establishes an equally urgent identity of its own. The older film is reportedly funnier and more agile. Here, the added solemnity and analysis can make the tale feel slower rather than richer.
Baruchel and Dowse previously worked together on Goon, and their reunion brings a willingness to let a Canadian underdog be abrasive, vain, and difficult instead of automatically lovable. That is a worthwhile instinct. Carter’s vanity is the story’s engine, after all. Yet a biopic about obsessive self-invention needs to locate changes in the person beyond restating the obsession. Carter remains compelling as a subject, but the film stays caught between affectionate spectacle and repetitive diagnosis.
For readers looking for another screen-story update on a very different kind of franchise, Scooby-Doo: Origins finishing production ahead of its Netflix release is also worth a look.
The Stunt Driver screened in the Special Presentations program at the Toronto film festival on September 11, 2026. Its technical execution, particularly Mishara’s format-hopping cinematography, gives the period recreation real polish. Cristóbal Tapia de Veer composed the music, Reginald Harkema edited, and Dowse produced with Jennifer Wilson. But its best images ultimately point back toward the extraordinary original material instead of providing a persuasive reason to supersede it.
