Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.Elevation Pictures/Supplied
- Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
- Directed by Matt Johnson
- Written by Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol
- Starring Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol
- Classification N/A; 100 minutes
- Premiered March 9 at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Tex.; opening in Canadian theatres at a later date TBD
Critic’s Pick
There is a beautiful, almost transformative kind of pain in watching the epic new Canadian comedy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. The sensation starts in the throat as a good and hearty chuckle. But then there is a forceful stir in the gut – that kind of cannot-stop-will-not-stop belly-ache laughter that hurts. And then come the tears. So many tears.
It is possible that my reaction during the world premiere of NTBTSTM at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Tex., late Sunday night could have been influenced by the oft-delirious atmosphere of the city’s young and hungry moviegoers, who make TIFF’s crowds look like the buttoned-up denizens of a Victorian parlour room. It could also have been fed by the frantic levels of anticipation that have been building for director Matt Johnson’s follow-up to 2023’s BlackBerry, one of the most thrilling and blistering Canadian films to come along in a generation.
But more than anything, NTBTSTM is simply hilarious – a furiously funny roller coaster of a film whose energy never, ever dips. It is difficult to imagine a better, sharper comedy coming along this year. Or the next.
A lovingly crafted ode to Canadian culture filtered through the vision of Robert Zemeckis acolytes, Johnson’s film is a passion project almost two decades in the making. Back in 2008, NTBTSTM was just “NTBTS”: a web series that Johnson and his co-star/co-writer/composer Jay McCarrol produced out of their shabby Toronto lair. The pair played hapless idiots named “Matt” and “Jay,” whose only goal in life was for their copyright-infringing group Nirvanna the Band to play a show at the Rivoli, a Toronto bar of middling repute. The co-dependent duo – Matt the brash fool, Jay the naive pragmatist – never get any closer to stepping inside the Rivoli, but they do endure all manner of extreme humiliation along the way.
It is a simple enough concept, but the series’ execution was next-level. Filmed in mockumentary style across the streets of Toronto – often roping in unwitting participants, or infiltrating such typically off-limits environments as, say, the offices of an alt-weekly magazine or the archives of the Royal Ontario Museum – NTBTS mixed real-world action with a beguiling layer of meta-humour.
The way in which Johnson and his prankish band of misfits – including cinematographer Jared Raab, producer Matthew Miller, editor Curt Lobb and so many others – twisted and torqued reality felt like the expression of a distinctly anti-Canadian ambition. They never let low expectations or dwindling resources – the twin forces behind our national “good-enough” spirit that can infect so many homegrown productions – dictate their imaginations and commitment to nailing a narrative beat.
After bringing the series to Viceland for two seasons – and enduring an exhausting corporate fallout that left their third season stuck in limbo – Johnson and McCarrol seemed content to leave NTBTS behind and focus on scaling more BlackBerry-sized heights. Yet improbably and wonderfully, they have decided to use their newfound cultural capital to go back to their roots … and back to the future, too.
The short pitch: after getting fed up once and for all with Matt’s Rivoli obsession, Jay decides to strike out on his own as a solo act, accidentally triggering a tear in the space-time continuum along the way. Can the two repair reality, and their friendship? Injecting Matt and Jay’s typical hijinks with a wildly witty riff on time-travel cinema – Zemeckis’s Marty McFly trilogy gets the most shout-outs here, but there are also nods to The Butterfly Effect and Primer – NTBTSTM tosses the two lovable doofuses into a head-spinning journey through radically rewired versions of Toronto history.
Without spoiling anything – and with the gags flying so fast over a propulsive 100 minutes, I lost track of at least 15 per cent of the various Easter eggs and allusions – it feels safe to say that Johnson, McCarrol and their sweat-every-detail team have discovered new and startling ways to maximize editing and visual effects while minimizing any signs of quote-unquote effort. The film’s layered unique visual language, which often combines two eras and aesthetics at once, is impressively mind-boggling – not so much preciously clever as painstakingly crafted.
The movie might also make a whole lotta heads roll, clean off. The Toronto Police Department, the Toronto Transit Commission, the city’s tourism board, the estates of certain celebrities both domestic and international – a decent number of officials and gatekeepers are going to be asking themselves (or their legal teams) some tough questions after watching the film, so ingeniously and brazenly have Johnson and McCarrol smuggled their movie into their seemingly impenetrable operations.
But the real magic trick of NTBTSTM is that you don’t need to know anything about Matt, Jay, the Rivoli, BlackBerry, Nirvanna (or Nirvana) to fall in love with the film.
Johnson and McCarrol establish their characters and dynamic so quickly and easily that the entire ride can be enjoyed as a simple-but-not-so-simple buddy comedy. One so unabashedly in love with Toronto – yet intensely playful about remixing and reconfiguring the city’s geographical reality – that it deserves to be awarded its very own Order of Canada insignia. Pin it hard, and pin it deep.