Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie creators Matt Johnson (left) and Jay McCarrol. The film hits theatres Feb. 13, 2025.Sammy Kogan/The Canadian Press
The story behind Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, the funniest Canadian film in ages, maybe forever, begins in 2007. That’s the relatively carefree and innocent era when friends Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol launched a bare-bones web series about two doofus musicians whose only goal in life was to play the Rivoli, a Toronto club of middling repute.
No, wait, the tale actually begins in February, 2023, just after Johnson’s big-screen comedy BlackBerry won over audiences at the Berlinale Film Festival, paving the way for the director to convince Canada’s film-funding agency Telefilm to turn the dream project of his youth into a full-fledged feature.
Actually, let’s rewind – or is that fast-forward? – to March, 2025, when NTBTSTM made its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Tex., where a 400-strong crowd of Americans were plotzing in the aisles over hyper-regional Canadiana gags involving everything from the CN Tower to Jian Ghomeshi (yes, the film goes there).
How Nirvanna’s Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol became the border-busting kings of a new CanCon era
Or maybe the timeline of NTBTSTM is impossible to iron out, the career trajectories of Johnson and McCarrol dependent on a rip in the space-time continuum, a paradox that is all too appropriate given that the pair’s new film is a lovingly crafted riff on Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future.
As with the looping narrative of Marty McFly and Doc Brown, perhaps it is best to simply pinpoint one date in Johnson and McCarrol’s timeline and pivot around it. So let’s go with May 3, 2024, which is when the NTBTSTM team – Johnson, McCarrol and a coterie of steadfast collaborators, including producer Matthew Miller and cinematographer Jared Raab – invited local press to visit their set. Or rather their quote-unquote “set,” given that the filmmakers treat the entire world as their playground, often roping in unwitting civilians on the street into their antics. Think Borat meets the work of Christopher Guest but spiked with the relentless pressure-cooker tempo of the Safdie brothers, and you’re halfway there.
“It’s about finding the right balance between chaos and order,” says Matt Greyson, the team’s long-time assistant director and producer.
McCarrol and Johnson play two musicians whose only goal in life was to play Toronto club, the Rivoli.Jon Laytner/Getty Images
Here, in and around a rented house on the edges of Toronto’s west-end Parkdale neighbourhood, Johnson and McCarrol lay out the winding journey of Nirvanna (the extra “n” is for legal purposes, as well as a joke in and of itself). How did the project go from a scrappy online sitcom to what just might be Canada’s most successful cultural export in decades? (Heated Rivalry at this point being a mere twinkle in Jacob Tierney’s eye.)
“The big challenge on this movie was financing, because we made this almost with 100 per cent of just Telefilm money, no American investment at all, which was a real miracle,” Johnson says, noting that the Canadian distributor, Elevation Pictures, kicked in cash to close financing (and also later admitting that he and producer Miller put their own fees back into the production, which cost about $5-million to make). “At this budget level, it’s not a big crew. It’s pretty much everyone you see today.”
That team is sitting inside a bruised and battered RV stationed outside the Parkdale house, the vehicle’s cabin festooned with pop-culture ephemera: VHS cassettes of E.T. and Armageddon, a Lando Calrissian action figure, a stack of such forgotten board games as Space Marine and Dragon Strike. But in the centre of the vehicle is a Y-shaped doohickey composed of plastic tubing and blinking lights that’s familiar to any fan of Back to the Future: a “flux capacitor,” a.k.a. the core component of Doc Brown’s time machine.
And it is this RV-slash-time-machine that drives the new movie’s plot forward, so to speak. The film opens like any other episode of NTBTS, with Johnson and McCarrol’s two heroes (“Matt” is the impulsive maniac, and “Jay” is the slightly more cautious daydreamer) hatching absurd schemes to play the Rivoli. But once Matt drops a bottle of the long-discontinued Canadian soda Orbitz into the RV’s electrical components, the pair are whisked back in time to 2008, where they encounter their younger selves (a trick achieved by repurposing footage shot by the pair back in the day).
But the RV serves a key metaphorical purpose, too, given that it was the vehicle that the pair used to rewrite their own professional history.
When the team started filming NTBTSTM in October, 2023, the plan was to make a road-trip comedy in which Matt and Jay drove the RV across America, the two certain that achieving fame south of the border would give them the necessary cachet to book a Rivoli gig. The crew spent four months shooting in Detroit, Chicago and New Orleans, driving the RV city to city.
But just as every episode of NTBTS ends with Matt and Jay falling flat on their faces, Johnson and McCarrol arrived back in Toronto with the realization that their road-trip plan had sorta flopped, too. The story just wasn’t working. But they still had the RV. They still had Canadian financiers who weren’t breathing down their necks to deliver a completed picture ASAP. And they had always been fascinated by time travel, at one point toying with the idea of a movie about Albert Einstein going back in time to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
It wasn’t too late to change their destiny by going back to the, well, you know.
Still from Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.Elevation Pictures/Supplied
“There was a moment of vulnerability where we explored some bigger ideas, how to take this up a notch,” recalls McCarrol, who also co-wrote the film and composed its score. “We’ve always allowed ourselves to be our own worst critics. We bond over what we see isn’t working.”
“Once we found a way to combine the footage we shot as kids with the RV idea, everything connected,” adds Johnson. “And that’s why it would have been so difficult to make a movie like this in any system other than Canada. I can’t imagine that we could be allowed to add this whole other element so late in the process. We were supposed to have finished this movie a month ago, and now we’re just shooting the time-travel element.”
The “Canada” of it all is a crucial point of pride and tension for Johnson, who has made a career out of pushing the buttons of an industry that could have shunned him but has instead contorted itself around his ambitions.
In 2016, while he was promoting his second film, Operation Avalanche, Johnson infamously cracked that “a lot of people just need to die of old age” for the Canadian film system to change – a poke that garnered the attention of veteran producer Niv Fichman (Passchendaele), who thought that the director’s provocative spirit might be well-suited to a project he was developing about the rise and fall of BlackBerry.
From there, Johnson – often along with his producing partner Miller – has done everything he can to both critique and boost the Canadian film sector, from refashioning Telefilm’s financing models to calling out unions for outdated policies to developing a growing web of world-renowned collaborators.
Jared Raab, Matt Greyson, Jay McCarrol, Matt Johnson, Matthew Miller, Robert Upchurch and Curt Lobb at the Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie premiere at the SXSW Film Festival on March 9, 2025 in Austin.Amanda Stronza/Getty Images
It would not be unfair to say that the moment when Johnson and McCarrol filmed their very first Nirvanna episode might be the CanCon equivalent to Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story A Sound of Thunder, in which the crushing of a butterfly eons ago radically alters the present day. Or, you know, we can simply dub Johnson and McCarrol the Marty McFly and Doc Brown of Canada.
The pair’s future, of course, is anything but written.
In September, 2025, a few days before NTBTSTM made its Canadian premiere on the opening night of the Toronto International Film Festival, where Mayor Olivia Chow erupted in laughter during a sight gag involving a raccoon, Johnson and McCarrol faced another potential butterfly-effect moment.
Their film had now secured U.S. distribution from the prestige indie outfit Neon (which released last year’s best picture winner, Anora). And Johnson had just finished shooting Tony, his biopic about the early days of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, which is financed by Neon’s direct competitor, A24 (Marty Supreme), and whose score will be composed by McCarrol. But there are more potential projects in the pipeline, too, from the much-whispered-about third season of NTBTS to another long-in-the-works A24 film. Heck, the guys could also revisit their experimental children’s cartoon series. Were the pair on the verge of burnout? Or, worse, going Hollywood?
“Tony nearly killed me – it was 24 hours a day, shooting from basically April till July, it was literally the only thing that I did,” Johnson recalls of the Bourdain film, which will be released later this year.
“But it’s great because [Nirvanna editors Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch] are handling what the movie is going to feel like, Jay is handling what it’s going to sound like, and then we’ll get back together and combine forces to make the movie what it’s going to be, the same way that it’s worked before.”
And while Johnson still has half an eye trained on the bigger budget world outside Canada – he remains attached to direct an adaptation of Magic: The Gathering for Legendary Entertainment (Dune) and Hasbro (Transformers) – his next project with McCarrol is another explicitly Canadian story, a journalism movie set in Toronto and starring Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things).
“I don’t have to convince anybody of my ideas any more,” Johnson says. “Well, except my friends, who I’m in constant war with.”
May time forever be on Nirvanna’s side.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie opens in theatres Feb. 13.