Ken Carter wanted to drive a rocket-powered car a mile across the St. Lawrence River. That extraordinary plan is the center of The Stunt Driver, a new film opening in theaters September 25, 2026. Jay Baruchel plays the Canadian stunt driver, whose ambition turned a dangerous jump into a public event.
The idea sounds like something a screenwriter invented to make a daredevil movie louder. Carter was real, and the planned jump is the true-story basis for the film. But the movie itself is a dramatization. Its official site warns that some characters, incidents, dialogue and events have been fictionalized, so a scene should not be treated as a historical record of exactly what happened.
One car, one river, one impossible-looking distance
Set in the mid-1970s, the film follows Carter as he tries to build support for a jump that most people consider impossible. There is engineering to solve, money to find and a public to convince. The distance is the part that makes the premise hard to forget: one mile over a major river, in a rocket car.
The official production photos show the bright yellow vehicle bearing Carter’s name and the people around his attempt. They also show how much of the stunt depended on attracting attention before anybody could think about the launch. It was not merely a private test run; the proposed leap was promoted as a spectacle.
Who’s who in The Stunt Driver
Jay Baruchel, Ben Foster and Ed Helms lead the cast
Baruchel carries the film as Carter. Ben Foster plays Evel Knievel, the more famous American daredevil whose presence adds another point of comparison for Carter. Ed Helms is also in the cast, along with Laurence Leboeuf, Dan Bakkedahl, Joe Cobden and Marc Beaupré. The distributor identifies Leboeuf as Gloria and Beaupré as Danny Lafortune in its photo captions.
Michael Dowse wrote and directed The Stunt Driver. The distributor lists it as a 99-minute comedy-drama. That combination fits a story that is absurd on paper but serious to the man staking his future on it. The film can laugh at the scale of the idea without claiming the risks were imaginary.
What is confirmed before release?
The theatrical date is September 25. The official film site and distributor agree on that. Neither source establishes a streaming date. The promotional material also describes the attempted jump rather than giving viewers a full accounting of every real-life outcome, and we will not turn dramatized details into facts about Carter’s life.
The reason this is a good movie story is the basic question Carter posed: how far can a stunt driver push a crowd’s belief that an impossible trick might work? Our The Stunt Driver film page has the confirmed cast, premise and images; the film itself will show how Dowse and Baruchel answer it.
