You can be forgiven if you don’t remember, or never knew, who Ken Carter was, although as you watch The Stunt Driver, you’ll feel a twinge of sadness that his name isn’t immediately recognizable. For Americans, it’s probably easiest to describe him as the Canadian answer to the daredevil Evel Knievel, although Carter would be appalled by that description. He jumped cars over things for a few decades before deciding in the late 1970s to do his biggest jump yet, maybe the biggest jump ever, by launching a rocket car over the St. Lawrence River, a distance of more than a mile.
Carter’s attempt to figure out how to do that was chronicled in a documentary called The Devil at Your Heels, and that’s essentially where we are in this new film, as a documentary crew follows around a fictionalized version of Carter trying to create and execute his jump. Director Michael Dowse melds an appropriate pseudo-documentary style with more controlled scenes to create a genuinely delightful, lively, funny, and surprisingly empathetic portrait of this complicated man who’s got enormously complicated feelings about what he’s trying to do.
Jay Baruchel plays Carter in what is far and away the best performance I’ve seen from the actor. Carter may be good at talking, and he talks a lot, but as Baruchel presents him, a lot of the bluster and bravado also seems designed to convince himself of what he’s doing. The movie features wonderful physical performances, none better than Baruchel’s, as we get to see a lot of middle-aged men with years of broken bones try to walk around normally, as if it weren’t the most uncomfortable thing they could be doing.
Baruchel brings a softness to Carter we might not have expected, and we can see how so much of what drives Carter is fear—fear of doing the thing, yes, but maybe even more a fear of not doing it. “People like me now,” he keeps saying, and he’s right, but we wish he didn’t have to feel like that. “People will remember me,” he says, and we wish so much that it were true.
The Stunt Driver is in theaters.
