I was unaware of Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s lo-fi comedy TV series, Nirvanna the Band the Show, before pressing play on Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie for the Imagine Fantastic Film Festival in Amsterdam. The title should have been self-explanatory, yet it’s so absurd I completely took it for granted. However, this oversight raises two questions: How does the movie hold up without any prior knowledge of the series? (Do the jokes land? Does it even make sense?) And how does it function as a follow-up to Matt Johnson’s excellent 2023 tech-biopic, Blackberry?
The answer to both questions is positive. The first is quite an achievement, as movie spin-offs usually double down on what made the show good, making them largely inaccessible to the uninitiated. Whether this accessibility is a by-product of quality writing or a toning down of the material for a mass audience – I am not in a position to address as I had no knowledge of Nirvanna this time yesterday. What I can address, however, is just how good it is.
Before that, I should clue you in on what Nirvanna the Band the Show is (it shall be referred to as Nirvanna from here on for brevity). In essence, Nirvanna is a mockumentary-style sitcom that ran for two seasons – produced in 2007-2009 and broadcast on the Canadian channel Viceland in 2017 and 2018. It follows the titular band, vocals by Matt Johnson and Keys by Jay McCarrol, on a series of escapades and plots to play at Toronto’s Rivoli. It’s not a renowned venue, just a wine-bar-like establishment that hosts performers from time to time, that’s the joke. The pair are followed by a camera crew, and the presentation creates a strong blurring of the line between the improvised, the guerrilla, and the staged. This principle is carried forth in the Nirvanna movie, albeit 17 years later.
The plan in the movie is to use a tour of the megatower next to Toronto’s (American) football stadium to cut their tether, parachute down into the stadium, somehow commandeer a microphone, and announce to the crowd that they are playing the Rivoli later that night. Naturally, it goes horribly wrong.
The pair have a falling out. Matt, the manic ringleader, remains utterly oblivious to this and cooks up a new plan: to create a fake video to trick people as part of another scheme. This latest idea is inspired by watching Back to the Future, to which the whole revisitation plays out as a massive homage, from plot details and music to core ideas. Only instead of a DeLorean, it’s a clapped-out camper van. After Matt makes a fake mock-up of the flux capacitor, it somehow becomes real when he spills a long out of circulation soft drink on it, sending the pair back to 2009. Once there, they mess with the timeline, creating a situation that forces them to fix their time-travel shenanigans.
This stupid, quasi-improvised found-footage comedy does things with time travel that would make movies like Primer green with envy.
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Even though it’s shot in a style on a sliding scale between mockumentary and found footage, the movie takes huge swings that constantly make you wonder whether it had a non-existent budget or a fairly large one (by indie standards). It must be the latter, given the licensing headaches it would otherwise incur. Even so, the movie’s audacity gave me endless pause for thought – it still does, days after watching it.
On a more fundamental level, the scale of Nirvanna impresses through its delivery and understanding of time travel. It throws around so many interesting concepts born from the situation these two idiots have worked themselves into. That’s not just a comment on their genre work, either; the script delves into darker, more fatalistic ramifications that most time-travel movies overlook. This stupid, quasi-improvised found-footage comedy does things with time travel that would make smart sci-fi movies like Primer green with envy (and the same goes for blockbusters, too). It accomplishes all this while remaining consistently amusing and entertaining. I kept waiting for the moment it would tip over under the weight of this conceptual dance, but the other shoe never dropped.
Comedy is a much harder trait to quantify. That being said, I found Nirvanna to be full of small moments of improv weirdness that had me gasping for air. The wildest thing is, there are so many jokes and inevitable in-jokes from the show that must have gone over my head. The fact that it was as enjoyable, funny, and provoking as a piece of time-travel cinema, despite my having no frame of reference, is a testament to its achievements. Going further, I believe the minute-to-minute storytelling here should be used as a model for how to turn comedy from the small-screen to the big-screen.
All that being said, it is a comedy. Despite the movies many inherent successes, I could present Nirvanna to someone else and they may question my judgement. And they may be right. Just don’t dismiss Matt Johnson’s latest movie because you haven’t seen the show. Jump in feet first, like me, you may be pleasantly surprised.
And no, it has absolutely nothing to do with Kurt Cobain either – at least not in the movie.
NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE PLAYED AT IMAGINE FILM FESTIVAL 2025
