A captivating road movie with an unlikely subject: Joshua Jackson is Ben, a young man who learns he is dying of cancer. This spurs him to abandon his life and take a motorcycle trip across Canada, and the result is a surprisingly biting drama that is also unabashedly patriotic.

Starring: Joshua Jackson, Liane Balaban, Gord Downie

Rating: Three-and-a-half stars out of five

There is a terrifying moment at the beginning of the Canadian road film One Week: the voice of Campbell Scott says, "What would you do if you knew you only had one day, or one week, or one month to live?," and it appears that we are in for 95 minutes of teary, end-of-life sentiment, and with a narrator no less.

Against those odds, though, One Week works. The person with a short time to live is Ben Tyler (Joshua Jackson), a half-hearted teacher and failed novelist, who is informed in the opening scene that he has a virulent form of cancer. His first thoughts are to wonder if he can call off the wedding to his fiancee Samantha (Liane Balaban, adding a tart note to her natural sweetness) and relief that he won't have to mark those exam papers, and also, curiosity abut how many people will be at his funeral. Ah, the prosaic freedoms of the death sentence.

One Week continues that surprisingly mordant quality - Scott's narration ends up becoming another voice in the film, both comic and poetic, that gives the movie a quirky kind of depth - as Ben decides to buy an old Norton motorcycle and drive across Canada. The movie takes him from Toronto to Tofino, B.C., with stops at his passions, those large monuments of giant nickels and geese and pipes that festoon the landscape. (Scott: "The world's largest teepee was a major disappointment. Ben couldn't say why.")

He also visits, in passing, a statue of Terry Fox, reminding us that Ben Tyler isn't alone in the Canadian mythology of a cancer victim crossing the country. One Week is not just unabashedly Canadian; it's celebratory about the fact. It's the first film I've ever seen where a character rolls up the rim of a Tim Hortons cup; it must be significant in some way that it gives him advice - "Go West Young Man" - that is not only prescient, but also (God help us) borrowed from the Americans.

Director/writer Michael McGowan, who made the sentimental Saint Ralph, mostly keeps his powder dry here, helped by a quietly moving performance from Jackson. The former Dawson's Creek heartthrob has grown into a pleasing handsomeness - he resembles Peter Sarsgaard - and he is both engaging and real.

He's helped by the fact that he doesn't have to dip into the emotional world of his memories: the narrator is there to do it for him, with a voice that has a nice sense of remove, and McGowan throws in stock footage that stands as flashbacks to Ben's youth.

We come to realize that Ben has lived a half-life, like many people, and that his abandoned dreams - the novel he never wrote, the songs he never sung - are what have come to define him. His awakening is made up of small things - a false accusation that his feet smell becomes a metaphor for imperfect love - and it comes slowly. One Week has the leisurely pace of a holiday that stops at all the interesting roadside stands.

McGowan isn't afraid to take a couple of side-trips into digressions that sometimes engage us (a meeting with Gord Downie as a pot-smoking cancer survivor) and sometimes seem undeveloped (a subplot about Ben's search for "Grumps," elusive creatures his father told him about.) We get to hear about the good luck that follows a couple of the people Ben meets along the way, and there's even a stop to see the Stanley Cup, which is unlikely but patriotic.

Ben coasts along to a soundtrack of indie Canadian bands; a couple of artists, Joel Plaskett and Emm Gryner, also have small roles in the film. The plunk of an acoustic guitar as a motorcycle rolls down the Trans-Canada Highway past wheat fields and through mountain tunnels is an exhilarating experience.

Ben's journey is captivating even though it's selfish: after all, what would you do if you only had one week to live?

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