‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’ Climbs to Giddy Heights

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, the latest film from BlackBerry director Matt Johnson, is precisely like its title. It’s built around a clear pop culture conceit. The homage is loving, if a tad irreverent. It’s absurd and its construction is unwieldy as all get out, yet the end result is more clever and daring than you would expect from its disparate pieces.

The movie is a continuation / adaptation of a web series that Matt shot from 2007 to 2009 with his friend Jay McCarrol. That series (the aptly titled Nirvanna the Band the Show) saw the fictional Matt and Jay attempting to book for their band (yep, that would be Nirvanna the Band) a show at the Toronto venue Rivoli. Alas, the duo’s enthusiasm outpaced their marketing savvy, and plan after plan to play the Rivoli came to naught.

The film jumps forward to 2025, revealing that a sustained lack of success has done little to whittle down their Nirvanna the Band’s hopes and dreams. His next grand idea is to parachute from Toronto’s CN Tower into the Skydome during a Blue Jays match to advertise their gig at the Rivoli. A gig which they don’t actually have yet. But as Matt insists, it’s an ‘if you build it, they will come’ sort of situation.

The CN Tower misadventure is the first real taste of what Johnson and McCarrol are aiming for with Nirvanna… the Movie. Recorded footage shows them interacting with hardware stores employees, tourists visiting the site, and security guards who all fall somewhere on the spectrum between skeptical and flabbergasted. It’s hard to know which interactions here are staged with hired performers and which are real moments with unwitting workers and passersby. There’s a guerrilla, DIY nature to the visual style and dialogue, alike. At first the mockumentary framing accentuates the story’s scope and humor, lulling the audience into expecting a small-scale comedic fare. But then the pair get to the top of the tower, and sure enough—they leap off.

This sequence is one of perhaps three or four insane swings for the fences that Nirvanna… the Movie has in store, and these are the moments where its haphazard components achieve comedic alchemy. A daredevil parachute stunt gets set aside for an even bigger plan involving a time machine back to 2008. Of course, as Back to the Future has taught us, messing with the past is a risky endeavor. And yes, there will be lightning strikes and flux capacitors, but enough about that movie, because as Matt warns: “This is gonna be a copyright nightmare.”

The individual elements of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie are humble, in and of themselves. But the combination of candid footage with staged scenes, and of footage from eighteen years ago with present-day Johnson and McCarrol somehow inserted, is a staggering, frankly brilliant work of construction. And through it all is a sense of genuine, good-natured warmth.

The duo’s intimate rhythm and camaraderie are the heart of this film. Matt is an overeager man-child, though his playful sincerity is a refreshing alternative to the belligerent, angry man-childs we often get in comedies. McCarrol is a little more relatable, clearly wearied at times by all the shenanigans. But he’s just as ready to be silly or play Nintendo 64 at a moment’s notice.

The comedic pacing is a little fitful, moving in starts and stops just like their RV-cum-Delorean. But when it does start, Nirvanna… the Movie accelerates to sheer giddiness. Last year I listed the Canadian film Universal Language as one of my favorite comedies of the year. Now with Nirvanna… the Movie, I have another small-budget, wildly inventive, Canadian indie comedy that might just crack my end of year list.