Actor Pat Thornton does what the Toronto police could never do. He nails Rob Ford, providing a chaotic and quite perfect impersonation of the late mayor of Toronto.

Four years ago, sitting in the back of a darkened car watching the crack video on an iPhone with colleague Robyn Doolittle, I felt like we were in a cheap crime drama. Late-night phone calls. Coffee. Drive to a prescribed location. Wait. Small talk. Wait. Get into car with strange man. Get driven to a parking lot. Convince a drug and gun dealer to show video of Toronto’s top politician smoking a rock of crack.

The Rob-Ford-on-crack we saw that night on video is the character Thornton has brought to the screen as Mayor Tom Hogg in the movie Filth City. Out of his mind on drugs for most of the film, wheezing, screaming, lecherous, crude and yet quite messianic in his desire to save taxpayers money. Our Ford had the slogan “Stop the gravy train.” This Hogg goes a bit further, vowing to take all of the social programs, the subsidized housing and the schools that are using up taxpayers’ money and “Suck them dry!”

Missing from his depiction of the mayor is what I came to understand as the sweet side of Ford — his actions tormented his family, but he did love them. Among Ford Nation, he was pretty much a deity. That’s why Ford Nation was so angry that the cops and media were after him. This Hogg has no family, but he does have a sidekick he calls “Bro,” a more sympathetic, though less loyal, character than the real Doug Ford, brother of Rob.

What is not missing from the movie is the crack, and lots of it. The cops do crack. Mayor Hogg does crack. Oh, and the guns. Agatha Christie once said that her approach to writing mystery stories was to drop in another body when things got dull. I stopped counting at 10 killed, mostly in wild shootouts.

Every time I grew to like a character in the movie, he was killed. (Then he was usually dumped near the ever-increasing garbage piles created by a sanitation strike.) That wholesale violence never happened in the Ford story, though two of the three men Ford was photographed with outside the Etobicoke house where the video was filmed were later shot outside a bar, and one of them died.

In Filth City all of the crazy rumours we reporters heard on the chase come to life. The suitcase full of cash in return for the video — it’s in the movie, but it never happened in real life. Cops on the side of the mayor, working aggressively to find the video to destroy it — unfounded scuttlebutt in the Ford case and, at the end of the day, it was then chief Bill Blair who confirmed the video’s existence six months after Robyn and I first saw it.

As in real life, the movie’s star is the crack video itself. The at times fruitless, fraught-with-danger search for the elusive iPhone clip that so many (in Toronto and in the mythical and garbage-ridden York City) wanted for their own purposes. Some wanted it to bring down a mayor. Some wanted it to make sure a mayor stayed propped up. And some wanted it to make money to get out of town, or to tell the public whom they had elected.

In the real story, there was more than one video. The viewing of the third video that came to light (this time in the back of a black SUV in the Sherway Gardens parking lot in Etobicoke) was a comedy of errors. While I was using my charger cable to help the fellow juice up his phone for a second showing, I learned from a text message that a friend of the SUV man had already posted the clip — of Rob Ford’s drunken late-night ramblings from the Steak Queen in 2014 — on YouTube. I always wondered if art would imitate life, and how much easier it would have been in the case of the actual crack video if it had simply been posted on social media.

And like Mayor Ford, Mayor Hogg had a simple plan.

“I’m gonna work my ass off to be the best goddamn mayor of all time!” Hogg tells a very high Hogg Nation campaign crowd. Apart from the carnage in Filth City, it works out a great deal better for this mayor than it did for ours.

Filth City closes the Canadian Film Fest, screening March 25 at Scotiabank Theatre. The show is sold out.