A scene from 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 PG; 100 minutes
Opens in theatres Feb. 13
Critic’s Pick (Again)
The new, instantly iconic Canadian comedy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie poses and then answers a number of previously unimaginable questions during its head-spinning, eye-popping, blood-pumping 100 minutes: What limits will Canadian Tire staff go to in order to ensure their customers’ satisfaction? How easily fooled is the security team at the CN Tower? Can you simply waltz up to Drake’s Toronto mansion following an international incident? And is there a way to somehow pull off a tasteful Jian Ghomeshi joke? But underlining all those queries-slash-cinematic dares is the big question: Is there no fate but what we make?
That last one, at least, was the heavy, T2: Judgment Day-inspired thought that I was left with after a third viewing of NTBTSTM the other week – a repeat screening that prompted me, for the first time in my Globe and Mail tenure, to go back and write a follow-up review after previously delivering my initial assessment, which in this case was filed from the movie’s world premiere at the SXSW Festival in Austin, Tex., nearly a year ago.
A wonderfully chaotic concoction that will leave even the grumpiest moviegoer rolling in the aisles, Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s epic is a time-travel comedy that uses an assaultive barrage of boys-will-be-boys gags to deliver a genuinely meditative interrogation of friendship, maturity, fame and whether destiny is predetermined or the great lie that we tell ourselves in order to mitigate life’s many disappointments.
Those themes may seem preposterously and/or portentously loaded when considering the base-line elements of Johnson and McCarrol’s creation, which is a super-sized version of their early-aughts web series Nirvanna the Band the Show (a cult hit online that eventually migrated to Viceland).
As in every episode of NTBTS, the new movie follows two lovable doofuses, the aggressively anarchic Matt (Johnson) and the more cautious daydreamer Jay (McCarrol), as they attempt to book the gig of their dreams: a night at the Rivoli, a Toronto club of middling repute. Like Pinky and the Brain but raised on a steady diet of ’80s sitcoms and late-night television (and, you know, not cartoon mice), Matt and Jay devise one absurd plan after another – sneaking into the Sundance Film Festival, stealing an ancient map of Toronto’s sewer system from the Royal Ontario Museum – only to see their Rivoli dreams dashed due to their own inescapable idiocy.
In this feature-length go-round, though, Matt and Jay toy with ideas bigger than Toronto, or even the universe as we know it, can contain. The result is a Trojan Horse of a movie whose thematic intentions and artistic ambitions become richer and knottier with every subsequent viewing.
The Canadian time bandits behind Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
After accidentally converting their RV into a real-deal time machine, the best friends end up going back to 2008, where they encounter younger, slightly more idealistic versions of themselves. Through various misdeeds and high jinks, the pair end up rewiring the space-time continuum à la Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future (complete with a DIY flux capacitor and a score by McCarrol that perfectly apes Alan Silvestri’s twinkly BTF music).
Along the way, the filmmakers stage a half-dozen astounding action sequences – all of them captured guerilla style, the filmmakers often roping in unwitting everyday Torontonians into the madness – that put both Sacha Baron Cohen and Michael Bay to shame.
In between all the outré gags, though, Johnson and McCarrol smuggle in a just-beneath-the-surface story in which the pair are forced to reckon with, in what feels like real time, two twinned themes, familiar to anyone who has seen Johnson’s 2023 hit BlackBerry: the universally nagging desire to hold off or rather outrun maturity, and what happens when creative partnerships are threatened by such inescapable truths as growth and failure.
Review: BlackBerry follow-up Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie will make you laugh till it hurts
In the real world’s timeline, Johnson has become the global face of his Toronto-based team’s success, the Canadian provocateur who has managed to break containment from the country’s cloistered film ecosphere thanks to BlackBerry, which he directed, co-wrote, and co-starred in (and in which McCarrol was the composer, story editor, and executive producer). Yet in NTBTSTM’s mixed-up chronology, McCarrol, or rather “Jay,” is the one who ends up becoming the internationally renowned superstar thanks to his sports almanac-like tampering, leaving “Matt” to chase his friend’s fumes.
In terms of time-travel tropes, that twist is a traditional but nevertheless fun flip of circumstances, one that that fuels all the comedic havoc to come. But when viewed through the prism of Johnson and McCarrol’s very real and well-documented two-decade-plus partnership – one dependent on a singular, combustible kind of chemistry – it lands as a bold approach that hits impressively close to home.
Layered on top of this tension are Skynet-scaled questions of just how far we’ll go to delude ourselves that our lives are not our responsibility alone, but subject to powers beyond our control.
To Matt and Jay – especially the impulsive Matt – the fact that they haven’t yet been able to walk through the Rivoli’s doors is not due to their schemes being hairbrained but because it feels as if the very universe is often conspiring against their ambitions. Perhaps the only way to fight against a predetermined destiny is to hop inside a Canadian version of Doc Brown’s DeLorean (a busted RV powered by the discontinued soda Orbitz, naturally) and become masters of time and space itself.
And when that doesn’t work? There’s only one thing to do: Laugh until you cry.