By Erin Free
Worth: $18.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Matt Johnson, Jay McCarroll
Intro:
A rolling stream of oddball joy, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is a true original.
First up, a cringe-inducing admission. Prior to viewing the shaggily entertaining and back-handedly ingenious Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, this reviewer was disappointingly ignorant of the singular charms of its creators and stars, Canadian humourists Matt Johnson and Jay McCarroll. In short, the expectations were low, but the rewards were huge.
Back in 2007, Johnson and McCarroll created the web series Nirvanna The Band The Show, which would later gain further legitimacy when it was repurposed as a TV sitcom in 2017 by hipster outfit Viceland. The basic premise of the mockumentary-style show, which was cancelled during production of its uncompleted third TV season, saw Johnson and McCarroll play bizarre, heightened versions of themselves. Though they don’t really play or record, they have a band – the eponymous Nirvanna The Band – and their big career goal is to play the famous Toronto venue The Rivoli. Instead of trying to book a gig, however, the duo engages in a variety of stunts and pranks to draw attention to themselves and gain notoriety.
As the movie begins, we quickly learn that nearly a decade later, Johnson and McCarroll are still trapped in the same wacked-out cycle, with the hyperactive Johnson spit-balling goofy, hilariously non-self-aware “show ideas” while straight-man McCarroll tinkers on the piano and thoughtfully (stupidly) massages the whole ridiculous situation.
Loveable man-children whose manic weirdness is charmingly offset by a curious sweetness, Johnson and McCarroll have some bizarre new ideas this time (one involves skydiving off Toronto’s CN Tower into The SuperDome, leading to a truly wondrous sequence that literally belies belief), which eventually snowball into the film’s central conceit. Via means too arcane to elaborate upon (but that involve an old RV, the Canadian soft drink Orbitz, and the Back To The Future movies), Johnson and McCarroll create a time machine (!), which they then use to travel back to 2008 to alter their present and future selves.
From here, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie attacks the cinema-notorious time travel conundrum with a gleeful intelligence that comes disguised in loose, freewheeling casualness. Like Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat and Bruno, the film is partially improvised and filmed on the streets and other “live” locations with unknowing participants (a featured hardware attendant should be a star after his turn here), but there’s nothing haphazard about Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie – it’s structured and crafted with true intent. Its playfulness is merely a ruse; this is deeply intelligent comedy indeed. It also, in some ways, locks in with other low budget sci-fi flicks like Primer and Dark Star (and a bunch of other films collected here), with its focus on ideas rather than special effects.
Using old footage from their previous iterations, Johnson and McCarroll interact with their younger selves, offering abundant sight gags and tricky situations, as well as slicing moments of pointed self-deprecation, particularly with regards to Johnson, to whom the years have not been so kind. There are pop culture and movie references galore, and one subplot (in which an alternate timeline version of McCarroll becomes a Calvin Harris-style pop superstar) is profoundly hilarious, boasting enough laughs to rate as an entire feature idea in itself. The manner in which Johnson and McCarroll inject themselves into rapidly unfolding real-life events is equally impressive.
This type of smartarse comedy is usually cruelled by a sense of smugness often propagated by unlikeable protagonists, but there’s something confusingly engaging about Johnson and McCarroll that is nearly impossible to pinpoint. Their ideas are big – very big – but the duo presents them in such an offhand way that they really sneak up on you and take you by surprise. A rolling stream of oddball joy, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is a true original.
