A new comedy called "The Stunt Driver" recounts the true story of a Canadian daredevil who dreamed of jumping the St. Lawrence River in a rocket-powered car.

The film is, by its own description, a mild charmer — a gentle comedy rather than a high-octane stunt spectacle. Its subject is the ambition itself: one man's plan to launch a car across one of North America's great rivers and land, somehow, on the other side.

Rocket-powered car jumps occupy a peculiar corner of popular mythology. The most famous attempt — Evel Knievel's 1974 try at Idaho's Snake River Canyon — ended in a parachute deployment and a crushed dream. "The Stunt Driver" reaches back to a Canadian parallel, a homegrown scheme to leap the St. Lawrence, the river that connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic and separates Ontario and Quebec from New York State.

The film's tone matters. This is not an action picture about velocity and impact. It is a comedy of memory, one that treats its daredevil with warmth rather than mockery, and its mood with nostalgia rather than adrenaline.

For audiences, the appeal lies in the specificity of the dream. A rocket-powered car is an absurd machine built for an absurd purpose, and the men who strapped themselves into such vehicles believed, sincerely, that glory waited on the far bank. "The Stunt Driver" asks viewers to sit with that belief — to find the charm in a plan that was equal parts engineering and folly.

What the film ultimately delivers is a portrait of ambition at a human scale. The daredevil at its center wanted one perfect leap; the movie around him settles for something quieter, and mostly earns it.

Whether the story of a St. Lawrence jump finds an audience beyond Canada — where the daredevil's name still carries weight — will be the test for this modest production as it reaches viewers.