The Indo-Canadian thugs of Deepa Mehta’s Beeba Boys are as quick to shoot as they are to strut. They spray bullets as casually as they choose pocket squares for their bespoke suits.

These Vancouver gang members are indisputably bad, but “Beeba Boys” translates as “Good Boys.” Led by smiling assassin Jeet Johar, played by Bollywood actor Randeep Hooda, they call themselves “good” with intent both ironic and lethal.

It sounds confusing, but it has good company in the Canadian film slate at the 2015 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 10-20), where badasses rule, heroes are tarnished and regular guys have a mess of issues.

The popular image of Canucks as the world’s meek boy scouts is in for an on-screen mugging, as seen in some of the noteworthy films amongst the dozens of new Canadian movies on offer.

Beeba Boys is one of the most explosive. So is Hyena Road, a drama set during the Afghanistan War where the role of Canada’s Armed Forces is seen as being far more complex and dangerous than the Tilley Hat-wearing and Tim Hortons-guzzling peacekeeper stereotype.

Paul Gross, the Toronto actor, screenwriter and director, has a hand in both these films. In Beeba Boys, he has a small but brutal role as Jamie, the enforcer for a rival gang who seems almost a comic figure with his ridiculous topknot hairdo. But nobody’s laughing when the blood starts flowing.

Hyena Road has Gross wearing several hats, as director, writer and co-star. His character Pete Mitchell is an intelligence specialist for Canadian Forces in Kandahar, tasked with covertly getting info and making political arrangements that will help coalition troops help the locals.

His bantering and bluffing ways put him at odds with Rossif Sutherland’s Ryan, an ace sniper with a much more black-and-white view of good vs. bad than Mitchell’s.

“A guy like Mitchell isn’t really allowing a whole lot of morality to enter into decisions,” Gross says in an interview, in the midst of final post-production tweaking for Hyena Road.

“They’re just really hard decisions about how to try to manoeuvre people into positions of power that are more consistent with the aims and objectives of the coalition forces. And sometimes it will go well, and sometimes it won’t.

“I think underneath it all, he is a moral man. But the world he’s working in is much more nuanced, with tons of grey areas and dark corners. Whereas, truthfully, the sniper’s job is relatively clear: there is a mission, there is an objective which can be either achieved or not achieved. It’s not as complex.”

That’s how things are in reality in Afghanistan, Gross says. He visited the country and Canada’s troops on goodwill tours in 2010 and 2012, and he decided to make Hyena Road after talking with soldiers about their jobs. (The film was partially shot in Afghanistan, the rest in Jordan and Winnipeg.)

Gross was eager to make a movie about how the world really works in a place like Afghanistan. He also wanted to show a different image of Canadians, mindful that his Mountie character from the popular 1990s TV series Due South presented only the squeaky-clean version of Canadians.

“I always used to feel slightly funny about Due South,” Gross says. “We were representing Canada to some extent as a sort of fable. And of course we’re not. We’re so many different things, just like any other place.”

Working out complicated identity issues was also a motivating factor for Toronto’s Deepa Mehta, who has long explored the immigrant experience in her films, such as her acclaimed Elements Trilogy.

Beeba Boys is based on a true story, just like Hyena Road, although the characters are in many cases amalgams of real people.

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“I heard the story and I said, ‘This is a no-brainer.’ It’s about Indians, it’s about Punjabis, it’s about Vancouver, it’s about immigration,” she told the Star.

“How do you assimilate, how do you not, what do you have to do to be seen? Because the whole thing for me has always been identity. How do we become visible from being an invisible minority?”

The bad boy of Alan Zweig’s HURT comes directly from reality. It’s the Toronto filmmaker’s harrowing documentary about Steve Fonyo, a national hero now viewed as a zero by many of the people he’s disappointed.

Fonyo, now 50, was the toast of Canada in 1984-85 when as a 19-year-old cancer survivor he ran across the country on just one good leg. He completed the trek started several years earlier by Terry Fox, earning millions for cancer research and earning himself the Order of Canada, amongst many other laurels.

But his post-race life has been a crash to Earth. Zweig finds him living a hand-to-mouth existence in Surrey, B.C., with a criminal record for petty crimes (he lost the Order of Canada in 2010) and a chaotic home life. He’s openly cheating on his wife with a new girlfriend.

The former hero has grown embittered towards Canadians: “The people of Canada are guilty,” he says. “It’s their fault because of where I am.”

Maturity proves elusive for Fonyo, but for the rascals of Toronto filmmaker Andrew Cividino’s Sleeping Giant, another Canadian film at TIFF 2015, its approach is something close to lyrical.

This coming-of-age drama, out to charm Toronto the way it did the Cannes Film Festival back in May, is set in the wilds of the Thunder Bay region. Teen pals played by newcomers Jackson Martin, Reece Moffett and Nick Serino get up to all kind of mischief during one momentous summer, where discovering girls could prove to be a more terrifying experience than leaping off the dangerously high cliff that becomes the film’s central metaphor.

There’s an altogether different kind of life change going on in How Heavy This Hammer, a drama by Toronto’s Kazik Radwanski (Tower) that watches what happens when adolescence ignores the calendar.

Sadsack Erwin (Erwin Van Cotthem) is a middle-aged man-child with a devoted wife and two young sons, who doesn’t seem to recognize what he has going for him. His life is consumed by the fantasy video game he constantly plays, a pastime he willingly interrupts only when it’s time to work out his aggression on the rugby field with his pals.

“I’m in the middle of a battle!” Erwin yells when his wife calls him for dinner. It’s a situation that can’t continue, although he doesn’t seem to realize it.

Erwin is in for an unhappy reckoning, as are many of the Canuck badasses at TIFF 2015, but at least no one will take him for a boy scout.