There are biographical movies that make you admire their subject, and then there are movies that leave you wondering how anyone thought the idea was remotely safe in the first place. The Stunt Driver (2026) falls firmly into the second category.
Directed by Michael Dowse and starring Jay Baruchel as Canadian daredevil Ken Carter, the movie turns one of the strangest real-life stunt stories imaginable into a messy, funny, occasionally heartbreaking comedy-drama. Carter wasn’t trying to become famous by doing something sensible. His grand ambition was to strap himself into a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental and launch it more than a mile across the Saint Lawrence River, from Canada toward the United States.
Yes, that’s the plan.
And somehow, the movie manages to make it feel both completely ridiculous and strangely understandable.
Set mainly during the 1970s, The Stunt Driver follows Carter’s obsession with spectacle, his need for an audience, and the increasingly desperate effort to make his impossible jump happen. The story draws heavily from the real events surrounding Carter and the 1981 National Film Board of Canada documentary The Devil at Your Heels, giving the movie a historical foundation beneath all the madness.
How Accurate is The Stunt Driver Movie? True Story vs Fiction in Ken Carter Biopic
Who Was Ken Carter?
Ken Carter was a Canadian stunt performer who built his reputation through dangerous car jumps, demolition derbies and increasingly outrageous attempts to keep audiences watching.
The movie doesn’t present him as some fearless superhero. That’s one of the things I liked about it. Carter is reckless, certainly, but there’s something much more complicated underneath the stuntman’s public persona. He needs people to watch him.
One of the film’s earliest sequences makes that painfully clear. After a crash, Carter is shown lying on a medical stretcher while addressing the crowd and desperately trying to convince them not to leave. He has just been injured, yet his first concern isn’t exactly survival. It’s whether the audience is still there.
That tells you almost everything about him.
His repeated attitude is essentially: I have to jump because people like me when I jump. It sounds funny at first. Then it becomes uncomfortable. Then, as the story progresses, it becomes downright tragic.
The Rocket-Powered Lincoln Continental
Carter’s ultimate stunt makes his earlier jumps look like child’s play.
He wants to build a 90-foot ramp on farmland near Morrisburg, Ontario, then send a modified Lincoln Continental flying over the Saint Lawrence River. The target is the American side, more than a mile away.
The scale of the project is completely absurd. Carter needs a huge runway, an enormous ramp, rocket propulsion, broadcasting money and people who are willing to participate in an experiment that could very easily kill someone.
Naturally, he finds them.
| Character | Actor | Role in Carter’s Plan |
|---|---|---|
| Ken Carter | Jay Baruchel | The daredevil determined to make the jump |
| Dick Keller | Ed Helms | Engineer working on the rocket system |
| Bill Wilkins | Dan Bakkedahl | Agent chasing television and financial deals |
| Danny Lafortune | Marc Beaupré | Carter’s devoted supporter and hype man |
| Gloria | Laurence Leboeuf | Carter’s wife, watching the obsession consume their lives |
| Evel Knievel | Ben Foster | Famous daredevil who questions the entire project |
This group is where much of the movie’s comedy comes from. Everyone has a different reason for being involved, but Carter is the one person who cannot seem to imagine a world where the jump simply shouldn’t happen.
The Project Starts Falling Apart
Building a machine capable of surviving a rocket-powered launch is one problem. Building a giant ramp and runway while trying to satisfy a television network is another.
Carter’s team faces engineering problems, financial problems and weather delays. The 1,400-foot runway and massive ramp become increasingly expensive, while the Lincoln itself refuses to behave like anything resembling a conventional aircraft.
And then Evel Knievel shows up.
Ben Foster’s version of Knievel brings exactly the kind of uncomfortable energy the movie needs. Knievel looks at Carter’s project and isn’t impressed. His assessment is brutally simple: the car is unlikely to survive the launch, and Carter could easily end up in the river.
The situation gets even worse when the project misses its television deadline.
ABC’s Wide World of Sports had become a major part of Carter’s plan, with the stunt expected to attract a huge audience. But the endless delays eventually kill the deal. The network pulls its support, and Carter is left with a massive project, mounting debt and no easy way out.
For most people, that would be the moment to stop.
Carter isn’t most people.
Carter Refuses to Quit
The next few years become an exhausting cycle of preparation, cancellation and disappointment.
Carter keeps trying to revive the stunt through 1977 and 1978. Mechanical problems get in the way. Weather gets in the way. Money gets in the way. Every time the project appears to be moving forward, something threatens to destroy it.
And that’s where The Stunt Driver becomes more interesting than a simple daredevil comedy.
Carter isn’t just fighting engineering problems. He’s fighting the possibility that his entire identity depends on one impossible stunt.
If the jump doesn’t happen, what is he?
On September 26, 1979, the project finally reaches another terrifying moment. Carter is strapped into the rocket car, the countdown is underway, and suddenly the fuel delivery system fails.
There are only seconds left.
The jump is aborted.
For Carter, it’s another crushing setback. For the people financing and filming the event, however, it becomes something much uglier.
The Betrayal That Changes Everything
By this point, an independent film producer controls the movie rights connected to the stunt. The producers begin to believe that Carter hasn’t simply encountered another mechanical problem. They suspect he’s lost his nerve.
That assumption leads to one of the most outrageous decisions in the entire story.
While Carter is staying in a hotel in Ottawa, the producers secretly arrange for another stunt driver, American Kenny Powers, to take his place.
Carter doesn’t know about it.
The rocket car that Carter spent years building is prepared for another driver, and the stunt he has obsessed over for years is suddenly going ahead without him.
This is where the film stops being funny in quite the same way.
The whole project was dangerous from day one, but now the people around Carter are treating an actual human being as replaceable simply because they want the footage.
What Happens During the Jump?
The secret jump goes horribly wrong.
Kenny Powers launches the rocket-powered Lincoln from the enormous ramp, but the vehicle cannot withstand the forces involved. The car begins breaking apart almost immediately after leaving the ramp.
Instead of flying across the Saint Lawrence River, it travels only around 506 feet before crashing into the shallow water.
Powers survives, but barely. He suffers catastrophic injuries, including eight broken vertebrae, three broken ribs and a fractured wrist.
The stunt that was supposed to become legendary instead becomes a brutal demonstration of exactly why everyone should have stopped.
And Carter’s reaction is just as significant as the crash itself.
He’s furious and devastated that his machine was used without his permission. More importantly, he argues that Powers wasn’t properly prepared for what the vehicle would do. Carter insists that the engineering itself wasn’t the only problem—the person operating the car had been thrown into an incredibly dangerous situation without the preparation he needed.
That distinction matters.
Carter may have been obsessed with danger, but even he wasn’t prepared to watch somebody else get sacrificed for the sake of a movie.
The Ending Explained: What Happens to Ken Carter?
The ending of The Stunt Driver is where the movie’s comedy finally gives way to something much darker.
The failed Saint Lawrence jump doesn’t cure Carter of his obsession. He keeps performing. He keeps chasing the crowd. He keeps trying to turn dangerous machines into spectacular entertainment.
Eventually, that obsession catches up with him.
On September 4, 1983, at Westgate Speedway in Peterborough, Ontario, Carter attempts another jump using a rocket-powered car. This stunt is much smaller than the Saint Lawrence project, but it is still dangerously miscalculated.
Too much fuel is delivered to the engine.
The rocket burns for roughly one second longer than intended, pushing the rear of the car upward during takeoff. The vehicle flips in mid-air and lands heavily on its roof.
The roll cage fails.
Carter is critically injured and dies on the way to the hospital.
There is no triumphant final jump. No glorious comeback. No last-second miracle.
And honestly, that’s exactly why the ending works.
The Real Tragedy Behind The Stunt Driver
What makes Carter’s story stick with me is that his biggest enemy was never simply a bad machine or an unreliable rocket.
It was the need to keep performing.
The giant ramp becomes almost a metaphor for his entire life. Carter spends years building toward one spectacular launch, convinced that the next stunt will finally give him the recognition he wants. But a launch is only half the problem. Someone still has to survive the landing.
Jay Baruchel’s performance makes that contradiction especially effective. His Carter can be hilarious, infuriating and genuinely sad within the same scene. He’s not portrayed as a perfect daredevil or a noble misunderstood genius. He’s a man who desperately wants to be loved by strangers and keeps raising the stakes whenever ordinary applause stops being enough.
That’s what gives The Stunt Driver more weight than its bizarre premise initially suggests.
You come for the rocket-powered Lincoln.
You stay because you’re watching a man slowly become trapped inside his own legend.
And when the final tragedy arrives, all those earlier jokes about crowds, crashes and impossible stunts suddenly feel different. The roar of the audience that Carter spent his entire life chasing wasn’t just background noise. It was the thing he couldn’t live without—and eventually, it demanded a price he couldn’t pay.
