Hordes of shiny-toothed movie stars will descend upon the city for the next nine days. Some will be just starting to enjoy the benefits of their new power and prominence. Others will feel more secure about the status they’ve achieved and the privileges they’re due as the pampered aristocrats of our age. Then there will be the more desperate sorts, those who will do whatever they can — starring in family-oriented comedies, undergoing experimental surgeries, pitching reality shows — to restore their fading lustre. They may preen like peacocks while walking into the Elgin but they know they’ll soon have to return to some dank film set in Bulgaria.

But there will be someone missing from this set of visitors. He belongs to a very select group of stars who have not only endured this life cycle but survived it. They were huge, then they were has-beens, then punchlines, then something else entirely: inspirational, perhaps? This is the arc that this man can claim though, sadly, the Muscles from Brussels must RSVP his regrets.

“I wish I could be at the festival,” says Jean-Claude Van Damme. “It would be so good for me.” Despite the distortion on the phone line from somewhere in Thailand, the emotion in his voice is palpable. “Can you mention something in the newspaper for me? I’m so upset not to be there — I say this very sincerely. I loved the chance to do this movie.”

That movie is JCVD and it may be the year’s most surprising. An ingenious commentary on the cost of fame and the fantasies that fuel action flicks, Mabrouk El Mechri’s feature is most daring as an exercise in self-excoriation for its eponymous star. The former pro kickboxer became a movie martial-arts hero thanks to the likes of Bloodsport, Universal Soldier and Timecop in the late ’80s and early ’90s. But by the end of the decade, his career was flaming out in a haze of drugs, divorces and straight-to-video dreck.

Rather than genially spoof himself in what is his first French-language feature after nearly 25 years in the business, Van Damme plays a version that’s often unflatteringly close to the truth. JCVD’s JCVD is an aging action hero — “I’m 47 years old,” he laments after wheezing his way through a gruelling sequence at the film’s onset — who wishes he could be starring in better fare. But he needs the paycheques due to the ugly battle with his wife for custody of their daughter. During a brief stop in his Belgian hometown, he heads into a post office to make a money transfer to his lawyer. What he stumbles into is a strange, funny and sometimes violent situation that again feels realer and smarter than anyone could have expected. No wonder JCVD gained so many ecstatic raves when it debuted at Cannes this year. The opening title for Midnight Madness, it’s one of TIFF’s most anticipated films.

Watch: EYE WEEKLY's Jason Anderson previews JCVD.

“It’s a different type of movie,” says Van Damme as he takes a break from his next movie, a self-scripted, self-produced and self-directed project called Full Love that he hopes will engender more goodwill. “JCVD gave me back a lot of confidence as an actor. I was in the category of an action star in America. Mabrouk saw something different in me, more sensitivity inside me.”

A 30-year-old director with one other feature to his credit, El Mechri explains over the phone from Paris that he wasn’t exactly a devotee of Van Damme’s previous works. “When I was a boy, I was very fond of martial arts. But though I loved Jean-Claude’s films when I was 15, I hated Jean-Claude’s films when I was 17.”

Nevertheless, El Mechri knows those movies had great nostalgia value to several generations of viewers — “they were like Proust’s madeleine for my youth,” he jokes. Moreover, the screen persona of Van Damme still had considerable potency. After all, he’d never been the indestructible type, the Seagal or Schwarzenegger who mows down dozens of baddies without flexing a facial muscle. Van Damme always seemed to play guys who got their asses kicked and then pulled themselves off the floor of the cage. As a result, he exuded a very human vulnerability, one that comes to the fore in JCVD.

As El Mechri says, “He wasn’t Superman — he was Spider-Man. He had flaws and weakness. This is the main thing about JCVD — it’s about the flaws of an action star. If you want to see Jean-Claude kicking ass, you can go to Bloodsport or Cyborg. If you want to see an action star dealing with human reactions, it’s JCVD.”

With that in mind, El Mechri retooled an existing script that situated Van Damme in a “fake Die Hard”–type scenario but didn’t exploit the project’s potential. El Mechri kept the essential premise of an action star’s encounter with real-life criminals. As the director jokes, “So what if he can do that special kick if someone else has a gun?” But the specific and sometimes controversial circumstances of Van Damme’s life and career also came into play.

“This is the story of the rise and fall of Jean-Claude Van Damme,” he says. “He did well, then he did not so well. He had a lot of problems with celebrity and with divorces and the press. But I was interested in what happened to his kids, and what relationship do you have with your kids when you’re in that spotlight? I wanted to take advantage of the actor he is, of the person he is.”

Once El Mechri had gained his trust after several emotional meetings, he was able to get the star to raise his game and take real risks. As for Van Damme, he says it’s exactly this sort of movie that he wants to be doing. He likens JCVD to his underrated, more serious-minded efforts with Ringo Lam, Maximum Risk and Replicant. (Van Damme fanboys could also point to such nobler precedents as Nowhere to Run, in which he plausibly wooed Rosanna Arquette, and Hard Target, the English-language debut for John Woo.)

Having proven that he’s not a stuntman or a has-been but a bona-fide thespian, Van Damme feels revitalized. “I’m hungry, like in the old days,” he says. “I feel like I’m following a good path. I’m back with my wife and my children. [In 1999, Van Damme remarried Gladys Portuegues, mother of two of his children.] I’m staying clean, just being who I am right now.”

And though El Mechri is careful to point that JCVD is no documentary, the man himself is grateful for what he was able to experience by playing himself. “Mabrouk gave me an opportunity to speak what I was really thinking,” he says. “When you go into a character, you become maybe more honest than you are in your real life. Maybe you become stronger or more of whatever you want to be. It’s very difficult sometimes to come back from that. It’s like you’re wearing a leather glove and then go back to a naked hand. You still want the glove.”