The Stunt Driver (2026)

I went to see The Stunt Driver for no better reason than that I had an open weeknight and it happened to be playing at a theater near me. It was a limited release; I hadn’t seen a trailer or heard anyone mention it, and the only name I recognized in the cast was Ed Helms. That’s usually a recipe for a shrug of a night out, so I was thrilled to walk out of the theater having seen one of my favorite movies I’ve watched in a while, and I’m still a little baffled that nobody seems to be talking about it.

The film tells the true story of Ken Carter, a Montreal stunt driver known as “The Mad Canadian,” who in the mid-seventies set out to end a decades-long career with a spectacular jump of more than a mile across the St. Lawrence River in a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental. I had never heard of him, which turned out to be the ideal way to go in, because I had no idea how any of it would play out and I was completely invested in whether this guy could pull it off. The story gives you a man who is chasing something enormous, a team of people who have to decide whether to believe in him, and a public that is more than ready to laugh at him. Carter is stuck living in the shadow of Evel Knievel, played here by Ben Foster, and the film is at its most compelling when it lets you feel how much that comparison gnaws at him.

Online, the movie is categorized as a comedy, and I don’t really agree with that. There is humor in it, because the premise is inherently absurd, but I’d call it a biopic first. It treats Carter’s dream seriously, it takes his doubts and his relationships seriously, and the people around him are written as actual people with something at stake rather than as setups for jokes. I think the comedy label might actually be doing the film a disservice, since it could easily turn away viewers who would love it and attract ones who expect a very different movie.

For a film that clearly didn’t have a huge budget, it does a fantastic job of making the whole thing feel big. The production is modest, but the story is told with so much confidence that I never once felt like I was watching something made on the cheap. Part of that is how it handles the era, and part of it is a structure that folds in the National Film Board of Canada documentary crew who were filming the lead-up to the jump, which gives the movie a nice sense of a story being captured as it happens.

The cast is a big part of why it works as well as it does. Ed Helms plays Dick Keller, the engineer brought in to design the rocket car, and he was great, grounded, and believable. Since he was the only actor I knew going in, I had nothing but the performances to go on for everyone else, and every one of them held my attention. Jay Baruchel carries the movie as Carter, and Laurence Leboeuf as his girlfriend Gloria and Dan Bakkedahl as his manager round out a group that all felt like they belonged in the same story. There wasn’t a single performance that made me wish the movie would hurry back to someone more interesting, which is rare for an ensemble.

What I keep coming back to is how much I enjoyed being introduced to a story I knew nothing about. A good biopic should make you curious about the real person afterward, and this one did that without ever feeling like a history lesson. It’s a movie that rewards you for taking a chance on a title you’ve never heard of, and it deserves a much bigger audience than it appears to be getting. If you’re a fan of underdog stories, true stories about people chasing impossible ideas, or you just liked Ed Helms in a more serious role, I’d highly recommend seeking this one out while it’s still in theaters.