Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie: a gloriously silly time-travel comedy about friendship and creative ambition

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is a title that requires a little unpacking. You see, circa 2007-2009, before Matt Johnson was the writer-director of such films as The Dirties (2013) and BlackBerry (2023), and before his friend and creative collaborator Jay McCarrol served as composer on those films and others, the duo starred as “Matt” and “Jay” in a no-budget, DIY web series called Nirvana the Band. A decade later, the concept was scaled up (and the title adjusted, presumably for legal reasons) as Nirvanna the Band the Show, which aired on Vice Media’s short-living Viceland cable channel from 2017-2018. Both incarnations were shot and set in Toronto, Canada, using the city as a canvas for prankish performance-art comedy reminiscent of Sacha Baron Cohen’s high-wire docu-comedy style, with characters who are millennial equivalents of Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman’s hapless songwriters from Ishtar (1987).

On each episode, aspiring musicians Matt and Jay devise a new crackpot scheme to land a gig at the Rivoli – a venerable local pub/performance space that, as Toronto residents likely know, isn’t all that hard to book. Matt is bombastic, extroverted, prone to riffing, and always balanced on the knife edge between charismatic and annoying; Jay is the dry, understated reactor, though not necessarily any wiser than his loudmouth friend. Only their friends can know for sure to what extent these characters represent a heightened version of Johnson and McCarrol’s offscreen dynamic, but their improv-heavy scenes together suggest the comfort of years of friendship.

Deep familiarity with the lore is not required to enjoy this feature-film expansion, which is accurately confident that any viewer will get the hang of things within a minute or two. After opening with a short prologue showing authentic mini-DV footage of Johnson and McCarrol in 2008, the film cuts to the present and throws us straight into its most ingenious set-piece: in their latest bid to attract the Rivoli bookers’ attention, the boys decide to parachute off the CN Tower into the neighbouring baseball stadium, the Rogers Centre. What follows is an audacious spree through the streets and skies of Toronto that feels hilariously, unnervingly real even after it can’t possibly be. Deep familiarity with Toronto also isn’t necessary to enjoy, although it certainly helps a little. A quick primer: the CN Tower is a radio tower and tourist trap that was once the world’s tallest building and is now merely a very tall building. Meanwhile, the Rogers Centre was formerly a publicly owned asset called “the Skydome” before a monopolistic corporation bought and rebranded it. Like all good Torontonians, Matt and Jay refer to it by its original name.

This early sequence, displaying so much technical virtuosity and logistical complexity in the service of a such a ridiculous idea, is emblematic of the pleasure of NTBTSTM: the way it stays true to its origins as an ad hoc web series while also indulging in the expanded resources of feature-film funding. The film’s time-travel plot (long story short: the magic potion is a long-defunct Canadian soft drink called Orbitz) is densely complicated and completely absurd in the correct portions, taking palpable joy in the idea that this story – this story – could be produced at this scale. Typical of the spirit of the enterprise is how it treats its mockumentary format: we know that two cameramen are following the leads around, and occasionally they make their presence known… but unlike This Is Spinal Tap (1984) or Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s The Office (2001–2003), the film makes a point of never worrying about the logistics of where and how a documentary crew might be present. If you can accept time travel, you can accept that the camera crew unhesitatingly went along with it.

All this gamesmanship wouldn’t work if it wasn’t grounded in something real. The history between Johnson and McCarrol brings extra-textual weight to Matt and Jay, and the scenes where their 2026 and 2008 selves interact invites consideration of the agonies and ecstasies of long-term creative partnerships. Like any marriage, a collaboration, especially one built on the bedrock of friendship, can inspire feelings of constriction and resentment. But it’s easy to lose sight of the meaning of life, which is making stuff with your friends. What’s the point of graduating if you can no longer play in the sandbox? It’s nice that Johnson, who has just directed an Anthony Bourdain biopic to be distributed by A24, took the time out of his fast-ascendant career to create an uncompromisingly silly story about the folly of careerism.

► Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is in UK cinemas 3 July.