The Mad Canadian

“The Stunt Driver”
Directed by Michael Dowse
Toronto International Film Festival
Opens Sept. 25, 2026

It’s no exaggeration to say that U.S.-Canadian relations have broken down to quite possibly their lowest point since the War of 1812. An escalating trade war has been marked by tit-for-tat tariffs, a boycott of American products, and a last-ditch effort this summer by the Trump administration to halt the opening of Detroit-Windsor’s Gordie Howe International Bridge. Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney made headlines for welcoming a proposal to make Canada the European Union’s first “associate member,” who despite the economic turmoil enjoys record-high public support.

This storm hung over the production and release of The Stunt Driver, a biopic that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month and hits U.S. theaters this week. The film tells the true story of stuntman Ken “The Mad Canadian” Carter and his doomed attempt to jump a rocket-powered maple leaf-emblazoned Lincoln Continental a mile across the St. Lawrence River, from Ontario to New York, as chronicled in the 1981 documentary The Devil at Your Heels.

The Stunt Driver is billed as a comedy, in part perhaps because it reunites star Jay Baruchel and writer-director Michael Dowse. The two previously collaborated on the 2011 hockey comedy Goon and the rom-com television series Man Seeking Woman, which ran from 2015-2017, and Dowse broke out with the hoser mockumentary FUBAR in 2002. However, for the most part the two play things deadly serious here, with Baruchel nailing Carter’s oddball mannerisms while grounding the performance with real gravity in a tone that often feels more like Oppenheimer’s doomsday dread than, say, Talladega Nights. The cast is rounded out by Ed Helms (The Office) as engineer Dick Keller, Quebec’s Laurence Leboeuf as Carter’s lover Gloria, and Ben Foster (Motor City) as Carter’s American rival, the more famous Evel Knievel.

The Devil at Your Heels provides more than inspiration for The Stunt Driver. Its director Robert Fortier is portrayed as a character in the movie, and The Stunt Driver incorporates not just verbatim lines of dialogue from the doc but also its footage, gleefully shifting between aspect ratios as it depicts a film-within-a-film. During a Q&A at TIFF, Dowse admitted that leaning on the doc footage was in part due to budget constraints — no need to reinvent the wheel, so to speak — though his film expands its scope somewhat. A real-life interview in which Carter was hypnotized on a Montreal radio station is dramatized as a framing device, portraying Carter’s drive as stemming from a deep-seated desire for the school dropout to feel respect, and the film also fleshes out his relationship with Gloria, who makes only a minor appearance in the original doc. The garish ’70s fashion and setting are expertly recreated here, though the biggest liberty is inexplicably changing the identity of Carter’s back-stabbing protégé from American to Québécois — an odd dramatic choice considering the context. Perhaps the thought of an American stealing Carter’s glory was too much, even if it turns out to be a Pyrrhic victory.

Surely Canadian audiences will find catharsis in Baruchel’s Carter telling off Knievel, “The last thing we need is a Yankee doodle dandy telling us how to do our jobs.” But the film’s overreliance on its ultimately far-superior source material raises the question of why it needed to be made in the first place. During a Q&A at the TIFF premiere, Dowse said he had been trying to make The Stunt Driver ever since he first watched The Devil at Your Heels more than a decade ago, and he finally got the green light last summer. When asked if watching the doc was a prerequisite for enjoying his film, Dowse emphatically agreed. “It’s a wonderful movie, it’s a fantastic movie, and you should all watch the documentary immediately,” he said.

Fortunately, The Devil at Your Heels is available to view for free online. While The Stunt Driver doesn’t quite manage to tell the story of The Mad Canadian any better than The Devil at Your Heels did 45 years earlier, there is still a value in looking for a hero in times of darkness.