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This story was originally published by our sister paper, Portland Mercury.
For nearly 20 years, Torontonian best friends Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol have chronicled the everyday existences of Torontonian best friends Matt (Johnson) and Jay (McCarrol) as they attempt to book a show for their band, Nirvanna the Band, at local venue the Rivoli.
Granted, they’ve never acknowledged that their band name might be a huge distraction for potential audiences, nor have they ever really contacted Rivoli management to ask about the venue’s scheduling process. In two decades, they’ve never even played a public show. Still, their mission abides; sometimes it means skydiving from the Canadian National (CN) Tower for some good old-fashioned viral marketing.
Nirvanna the Band the Show is that 20-year chronicle—a seemingly never-ending autobiographical narrative, like Karl Ove Knausgård’s six-volume My Struggle—that details their daily, repetitive, and sometimes dangerous schemes to score a show at the Rivoli.
What began as a baby-faced web series in 2007 and eventually graduated into a Viceland sitcom in 2017, is now Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. It’s tantamount to their lives’ work. Distributed by Neon, recent Oscar-darlings who brought us The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value, the release of this film is second only to getting a gig at the Rivoli.
The movie is exceptionally funny, especially with an audience. Dopey gags, painful stunts, and mean-mugging abound as our protagonists accidentally transform their RV into a time machine, using Back to the Future as a blueprint to hatch a plan to, of course, get a show at the Rivoli.
Finding themselves in 2008, they’re confronted by achingly specific allusions from the first Obama administration. (Remember the original lyrics to Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started”?) So Matt and Jay must follow Doc Brown rules to get back to their future without changing their past.
Convinced by pop figureheads like Robert Zemeckis and shows like Entourage that the elemental tides of storytelling, fueled by farce and nostalgia, will allow them to accomplish all they put their minds to—which in this case is headlining a show at the Rivoli—Matt and Jay of Nirvanna the Band are slightly fictionalized versions of the real-life Matt and Jay. They’re two normal-ish elder millennials who have siphoned themselves through movie and TV tropes into timeless, innocent weirdos.
Thus, at the heart of Nirvanna the Band, meticulous parody and avoidance of copyright infringement rubs up against the bleak reality of urban life, creating a giddy friction between the bracing stupidity to which Matt and Jay devote themselves and the drudgery experienced by everyone else.
In fact, much of the anxious hilarity of the Nirvanna the Band the Show came from wondering, often aloud, what exactly was real and what was scripted. With cinematographers Jared Raab and Rich Williamson following Matt and Jay everywhere, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie also wavers, like its episodic predecessor, between faux documentary and hidden camera prank extravaganza.
But rather than exploiting cringe humor or just messing with unsuspecting normies, Matt and Jay discover a kind of freedom to be themselves while indulging their deeply cinematic impulses.
Once furnished with a studio budget, these impulses lead to some of the most dumbfounding scenes I’ve had the good fortune of witnessing in a theater. Yet, beneath the shock and awe, the Movie is the careful craft of dedicated artists. When Matt and Jay encounter their 2008 selves, the project doesn’t rely on de-aging CGI, but hundreds of hours of work from editors Robert Upchurch and Curt Lobb, who picked through old footage from the show’s initial web run. Behind Jay and Matt’s mania is a team quietly dedicated to unearthing miraculous material.
Similarly, outside of the thinly veiled facsimile of his life in Nirvanna the Band, Johnson has been a prolific filmmaker. After cutting his teeth on Nirvanna the Band the Show, he followed up his feature debut The Dirties (2011) with Operation Avalanche (2016), a comedy thriller about faking the Moon landing in 1969, which involved Johnson’s crew bluffing their way into NASA offices to surreptitiously film whole scenes on a shoestring budget.
In 2023, Johnson made Blackberry, a partly fabricated “true story” of the founding of the titular company, featuring a squealing, baldpated Glen Howerton. The next year, Johnson starred in Kazik Radwanski’s Matt and Mara, in which he played an over-talkative guy named Matt, likely riffing on himself as much as he is in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Instead of inhabiting a character, he piles on layers of pop cultural patinas.
Whether it’s the aforementioned skydiving incident or sneaking onto a crime scene outside of Drake’s mansion, the hint of reality in the movie’s every moment is more than enough to sustain the spectacle. Even now, I can feel my stomach churn knowing that when Matt is standing on top of the CN Tower, trilby staying on his head by sheer will, there is more of a chance than not that Johnson actually did that.
Laughing, sometimes, is just what happens when your brain doesn’t know what else to do with the information being presented. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is a tribute to the unbelievable shit you can pull off with your best friend and a few professional-looking cameras.
Do Matt and Jay make it back to the present? They have to, because Nirvanna the Band must go on, and more importantly, must play at the Rivoli. Someday. They have no other choice. For the real-life Johnson and McCarrol, this is Nirvanna the Band the Show the Existence, the stuff of crazed movie magic.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie opens in wide release on Friday, February 13.
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Dom Sinacola
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