In “The Stunt Driver,” Jay Baruchel reteams with his “Goon” director Michael Dowse and takes on a showy lead part as stunt driver Ken Carter, who’s best remembered for a jump he didn’t make: a proposed mile-long leap over the St. Lawrence River in a rocket-powered car. The five years spent on that ill-fated project were captured in the 1981 documentary “The Devil At Your Heels,” which “The Stunt Driver” credits as source material but doesn’t improve on. While the technical aspects of the period recreation are impressive, this remake never finds its own reason to exist.
As in the doc, Carter is introduced executing a stunt jump which leaves him injured and begging the crowd not to leave, addressing them from the stretcher before being carried off. That naked lust for the adulation generated by danger is more bluntly stated when Carter repeats variations on “I gotta jump, people like me” as sufficient justification for his extremely dangerous stunt, the requirements of which include constructing a 90-foot ramp to launch the car. The documentary’s archival footage is seamlessly intercut with staged recreations as Carter assembles a small team of enablers: engineer Dick Keller (Ed Helms), sports agent Bill Wilkins (Dan Bakkedahl), goofy Quebecois protege and hype-man Danny Lafortune (Marc Beaupré). In standard biopic fashion, Ken’s wife Gloria (Laurence Lebouef) is relegated to worrying and suffering in the background.
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Granted interviews with surviving friends and access to unused footage from the documentary, Dowse takes particular advantage of a forgotten radio interview in which Carter was hypnotized. While the additional insight from this rediscovered artifact provides the foundation for a degree of vulnerability and self-revelation that the documentary couldn’t tap into, Carter’s fears remains one-note even when grounded in reality. Carter’s naked craving to be liked and the class-based chip on his shoulder take on sinister connotations at moments when Baruchel sounds strangely like Richard Nixon, further muddying the emotional waters.
When not mired in pathos, Baruchel plays Carter as an eccentric showboater, especially in his elaborate dialogue, which is far beyond the quotable but comparatively low-key man shown in the documentary; the final scene’s slow dissolve fade from Baruchel to the real subject only heighten the oddities of the actor’s performance. Speaking to the trade-war tensions of the present moment, “The Stunt Driver” also makes Carter a zealous Canadian patriot who derides rival stuntman Evel Knievel (Ben Foster) as an unwelcome “yankee doodle dandy” and later yells, “I eat Americans like you for breakfast!”
Besides the additional psychologizing and final 20 minutes, which address Carter’s years after the jump, the film makes one major alteration to the source text. Presumably because the name of the American stunt driver who took Carter’s place on the jump, Kenny Powers (as in the protagonist of “Eastbound & Down”), would be a distraction for many viewers, both name and personality have been changed to Quebecois comic relief Lafontaine. While both the casting and location choices honor Kane and Baruchel’s shared Quebec background, the change of Powers’ nationality omits another logical place to heighten the anti-American angle. (In a very specific feat, the film’s most notable performance is arguably given by Joe Cobden as “Devil” director Bob Fortier; the actor’s speech patterns are eerily like the real ‘70s thing to a degree unheard since Jon Voight channeled Howard Cosell in “Ali.”)
The first 80 minutes toggle between restaging scenes from the documentary while matching its academy ratio, and alternately providing additional context in widescreen, with a third aspect ratio thrown into the mix at the climax. The idea is clear: the documentary shows some but not all of the truth, so the new film is supplemented by a glossier but more emotionally truthful format and complemented at the end by a new format to heighten Carter’s anxiety. DP Sara Mishara does a bravura job of using numerous formats (digital and actual 16mm, as well as 35mm stock, among others) and rendering them period-plausible as well as handsomely lit and colored in their own right. “The Stunt Driver” is, nonetheless, slow going, and less enjoyable than the funnier, springier documentary it takes great pains to expand on.
