Ken Carter was a Canadian stunt driver who earned his nickname “The Mad Canadian”. Born in Montreal and raised in a working class neighborhood, Carter would eventually drop out of school and hit the road with a team of travelling daredevils. He performed numerous car stunts with the group before taking off on his own as a solo act. He made a name for himself throughout the 1970s, performing jumps all across North America.

In 1976, Carter set out to best his American rival Evel Knievel by pulling off what would be advertised as “The Greatest Jump of All Time”. It was a one-mile jump across the Saint-Laurent River in a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental. Carter and his team’s preparation for the jump was the subject of a documentary called “The Devil at Your Heels” directed by Robert Fortier. The making of that documentary helped inspire the new film “The Stunt Driver”, a biographical comedy anchored by a Jay Baruchel performance that completely caught me by surprise.

Michael Dowse writes and directs this genuinely funny yet surprisingly heartwarming feature. It’s based on a true story yet is very upfront about fictionalizing certain characters, names, and incidents for dramatic effect, not unlike other movies inspired by actual events. Dowse offers up a thoughtful consideration of Ken Carter and the internal forces that drove him to put his life on the line. But he does so with a unique sense of humor which feels strangely organic to this somewhat bonkers story, and a compelling visual language. But more on it in a second.

Baruchel’s fascinating performance is the linchpin. He portrays Ken Carter through a striking combination of blaring bravado and quiet insecurity. When the cameras are rolling or a microphone is in front of him, Ken puts on a show full of brash self-promotion and overconfidence. But when left alone with his thoughts, his swagger vanishes and we see a man who is self-conscious, unfulfilled, and afraid. As anticipation and expectations mount, the two sides of Ken inevitably converge.

Much of the film chronicles the planning and preparation for Ken’s epic jump which will see him launching from Morrisburg, Ontario, across the Saint-Laurent River, and landing in New York state, assuming everything goes right. We see the troublesome construction of the 90-foot-high ramp. We meet the highly skeptical rocket scientist Dick Keller (Ed Helms) who is brought in to design Ken’s car. Evel Knievel (Ben Foster) pays a visit as a special correspondent for ABC who has agreed to air Ken’s jump on their television program “Wide World of Sports”. And it’s all being captured by documentarian Bob Fortier (Joe Cobden).

As deadlines are missed and numerous postponements push the jump back years, the relationships become as combustible as Ken’s souped up rocket car. The lone stabilizing force in his life is his wife Gloria (Laurence Leboeuf) who encourages him to walk away. But Ken’s urgency to prove himself to the world fuels his commitment. That inner conflict adds a psychological component to the story that Dowse commits to. Unfortunately Gloria herself isn’t given much to do despite feeling far more significant than her screen time might indicate.

Visually, “The Stunt Driver” is a dazzling mix of formats and ratios which instantly hearkens back to a 1970s period aesthetic. Additionally, Dowse and cinematographer Sara Mishara shrewdly blend original archival footage with newly filmed dramatizations. At times it conveys the feeling of watching a boxy 16mm documentary. Other times it resembles a textured and grainy 70s drama. It’s all accented by an authentic period production design and costumes which add to the immersion.

While “The Stunt Driver” only offers us a sliver of Ken Carter’s life, Dowse gives us a good sense of who he was and what pushed him to the extreme. The story gets a little wobbly in the last act as tensions boil over to ridiculous levels. But Dowse never loses track of the human pulse. And it’s that humanity, along with some well-modulated humor, that makes this underdog story both raucously entertaining and oddly inspirational.