"As far as I'm concerned, Nirvanna the Band is playing the Rivoli tonight."
In our current franchise saturated landscape, it’s almost impossible to walk into a movie completely cold, knowing nothing about its past iterations, and enjoy the movie for what it is. This makes the notion of seeing a film called Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie seem daunting on the surface, as the film’s origins date back to a 2007 Canadian web series. However, the miracle of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is that absolutely none of that matters, and it can be enjoyed fully by anyone at any level of familiarity with the source material.
The film’s director, Matt Johnson, co-wrote the script with his best pal Jay McCarrol, who looks eerily like a young Dustin Hoffman, and the pair star as the titular band that’s not really even a band. Their goal since around 2008 is to play The Rivoli, a modest capacity venue in Toronto seating around 200 people. We first meet them in 2008 sketching out the details of their opening number before jumping to 2025 where they’re still doing the same thing: Spending the bulk of their time hatching hare-brained schemes to promote their non-existent gig, rather than working toward that goal by practicing their music.
In fairness, Matt is spending all of his time with the schemes while Jay gets pretty good at the piano, but that’s not necessarily important right now. But it is important. And that’s the brilliance of this film, every single little thing is important at some point in time. The gag set-up to pay-off ratio in this film—however delayed that pay-off may be—is absolutely insane. This is the most joke dense movie I’ve ever seen, with sometimes as many as four jokes inside of one joke. Still, the film remains light on its feet at all times, never staying rooted in any one plan or scheme for longer than the bit can bear.
I’m truly torn on how much to spoil, because I went in knowing absolutely nothing and was almost immediately won over by the brash Canadian energy of the main duo. Theirs is a brand of comedy clearly derived from the Tom Green school of making bystanders unwilling participants in some madness. But, whereas Green was almost always confrontational and never had a plan, Matt and Jay are so polite and unassuming, while also having the most meticulously concocted plan imaginable. They’re not asking or expecting anyone to embarrass themselves, just that they’ll be nice enough to allow Matt and Jay to embarrass themselves.
I will say that time travel is part of the narrative and the film is firmly subscribed to the Back to the Future universe’s understanding of time travel, to the point where that trilogy’s iconography is all over this movie. I'm thrilled that Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis (presumably) signed off on these loving homages, because this film simply wouldn’t function without them. And this isn’t lazy homage, where a film falls back on a tired trope to wring some cheap heat nostalgia out of the audience. This is a movie by and for the people who know those films inside and out and will recognize when entire sections of the plot are running parallel to those movies.
The two most prevalent thoughts I had throughout the film were, “How did they get away with this,” and “How long have they been planning this movie?" The answer to the first is almost always “Canada,” they’re just better than us in almost all respects. The answer to the second is, “I have no clue,” but it seems like they’ve at least had the skeleton of this film in their heads since 2008. The film is simultaneously ramshackle and thoroughly mapped out, with helpful and hilarious black and white flashbacks to scenes you’ve already seen, sometimes with different dialogue, or additional dialogue, or new context.
There are some jokes that, shall we say, venture off the beaten path and make you wonder why on earth they’re taking this circuitous route, only for the punchline to be sublime. For example, in one scene set in 2008, they make a point of putting a sign on the marquee of a movie theater advertising a "Sneak Preview" of The Hangover a year before that movie played in theaters, just to take a deserved shot at a gross movie that’s weirdly beloved.
Only after seeing this film did I realize that Johnson has directed a number of movies including the absolutely fantastic 2023 movie BlackBerry, as well as an upcoming Anthony Bourdain biopic. Based on the films of his I’ve seen, the guy is clearly talented and I’m eager to see whatever else he does, especially if it’s in this same vein.
I know that, “Trust me, bro” isn’t the strongest way to end a movie review where I’ve said very little about the movie itself or what it’s all about, but I think that’s the way it’s gotta be. This movie deserves it, and you as a viewer of the film deserve it, so I’m going to tell you that there is simply no way you’ll hate this movie. You may not be bowled over by it and may be more baffled by it than anything, but the Canadian niceness of the film helps sand off its roughest edges. This is one of the most original pieces of gonzo performance art cut into a feature length film that I have ever seen. Period. End of sentence. End of review.
Header image via IMDb