Director: Matt Johnson
Stars: Jay McCarrol, Matt Johnson, Jared Raab
With a steadfast, myopic and seemingly unachievable mission to rival Pinky and the Brain, Matt (Matt Johnson) and Jay (Jay McCarrol) have been trying to play a show at Toronto’s mid-tier venue The Rivoli for nearly two decades now. Beginning as a flinty pop-culture riffing web series back in 2007 before a brief television sojourn a decade later, Nirvanna: The Band the Show has, over the years, added an ‘N’ to its moniker and now upgraded to our cinemas, dragging it’s mid-’00s quasi-vérité style (redolent of then-hit comedies Arrested Development or The Office) right along with it. Smartly, the tensions between what was popular then and now are built into the very fabric of this theatrical venture. The gap between the two a looming chasm deep enough for the whole thing to fall into. Teetering on the brink of this, somehow, improbably, Nirvanna: The Band – the Show – the Movie still works. And works gangbusters, folding into a growing number of comedies trying to revive the flagging, flailing concept of Male Friendship through sheer, dumb celebration and ingenuity.
Footage from the first episode of the webseries opens the movie, smartly catching up newcomers on the show’s extremely simple concept – a band that isn’t a band trying to get a gig – while also (re)familiarising us with it’s mid ’00s aesthetic. This latter part is key. When Matt’s latest hairbrained plan to get a show at The Rivoli proves yet another failure, a weary Jay is ready to throw in the towel. Cagily booking an open mic spot in Ottawa, Jay tries to abscond in their old RV, unaware that Matt has kitted it out with a homemade time machine modelled on obsessive rewatches of Back to the Future. Inexplicably the fake time machine works and Jay is transported back to 2008 with Matt unwittingly stowed away, too.
It is this dopey conceit that allows Nirvanna: The Band – the Show – the Movie to reckon with its own past and confront how the landscape of taste and political correctness has evolved in the meantime. Hilariously, in spite of a wealth of evidence to suggest what’s happened, it isn’t until Matt goes to a ‘sneak peek’ preview of The Hangover and catches the packed audience laughing at the movie’s abundant use of F-slurs that he cottons on (outed by a f***** joke – the irony!). Elsewhere, nods to Bill Cosby and the music of the Black Eyed Peas further feather in a sense of cultural evolution and accountability that’s occurred in the interim. It’s pertinent because at it’s beginnings NtBtS wasn’t above some of the then-acceptable traps of comedy that punched down. Butting up against these things now feels like an acknowledgement of past deeds. Even if they weren’t severe enough to require remedying, the mea culpa is appreciated.
But the main objective here is for Matt and Jay (and Matt and Jay) to celebrate. What they made. What they’ve nurtured through two decades. And what they mean to one another, both as characters and collaborators. This is a loopy, dizzying, inventive buddy movie, bolstered by a healthy amount of outside-the-box thinking and some actually clever, subtle VFX. Perhaps inevitably while in their Toronto of 2008, Matt and Jay run into themselves, cleverly intersplicing old and archival footage along with body doubles to sell some uncanny interactions. Elsewhere, the show’s mockumentary immediacy is used to really sell the hell out of some queasily vertiginous stunts atop the city’s CN tower and Skydome arena. The real world seems to blunder into shot often, while a couple of their hidden camera stunts play like outtakes from Jackass – another long-running series that has recently made a return to celebrate the male bonds at it’s centre. Bonds forged in slapstick, humour and the need to play the clown.
Using this footage of their younger selves paints N:tB-tS-tM as a document of physical change, also. It can’t help but feel a pang of mortality. Sure, the duo play Matt’s slow transformation into a doughy 40-something for laughs, but the two let vulnerability into the characters. The passage of time comes with inherent introspective qualities. These may only flash across their faces, but they register and lend the film it’s beat-skipping heart.
At one point – not unheard of within this world – Matt full-on addresses the camera in desperation. “This is going to be a copyright nightmare!” he exclaims, acknowledging the degree to which the movie has riffed on extant IPs, products, etc. It’s not the only plucky feature to plough into the mires of parody and fair usage laws lately. One could imagine these two having a fun chat with Vera Drew. But the eagerness to overcomplicate their own situation feels like a metatextual dimension playing in conversation with the movie’s plot shenanigans. Instead of having its own iconic title sequence, the web series used to openly borrow from the hits of the time (The Wire, Frasier) including one episode that full-on lifted from LOST an entire ‘previously on’ section (one of the funniest bits). That spirit continues here, and the LOST ‘flashback whoosh’ is deployed jovially every time we jump back to (often mis-remember) a prior event.
Mis-remembering the past… embracing the tomfoolery of time travel paradox stories… Nirvana: the Band – the Show – the Movie is playful even down to the glue that somehow holds it all together, daring the audience to try and separate the pieces for all the good that would do. Like the Jackass boys, like Tim Robinson’s anarchic Friendship movie for AI24, Johnson and McCarrol are about loving, self-deprecating appreciation for the guys getting through life by sheer fucking accident.
Getting onstage at The Rivoli was never the point.
The Lost Highway Hotel 