Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

10

If you like meta, you’ll love this movie. If you like a film that is conceptually on par with something you and your college buddies dreamt up all stoned in your sophomore dorm room, you’ll also enjoy this incredibly Canadian adventure. Not that Canada and being high are somehow related, but there is a lot of Bob and Doug McKenzie going on here. Hoser. And some Flight of the Conchords. Though they’re from New Zealand. Which is basically the Canada of Australia. But, if you’re not familiar with the Nirvanna comedy duo, they had a web series called Nirvana the Band the Show for a couple years between 2007 and 2009, and a subsequent TV show on some weirdo Canadian network called Viceland and titled Nirvanna the Band the Show that ran for a couple seasons around 2017. And now they made the movie that kind of rounded out all this called, cleverly, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Get it? Most Canadian joke ever. The extra ‘n’ is for “nerd.” Or, most likely, to avoid lawsuits from the Nirvana estate. Which I think now is just Courtney Love?

Anyhow, there is a real advantage to having all this past footage to draw from — most of which has never been seen by us American types — when you’re making a time travel movie. It’s ingenious, honestly. Not having any history with these two dudes, Jay McCarrol and Matt Johnson, I really had very little understanding of their ages or generally what they look like in 2026. So when we flash back to these guys in 2008 and they look younger and, uh, their jawlines are a little sharper, I wondered how this low budget film could afford de-aging that looks better than any of the big studio films. Welp, that’s because they have years of film on themselves in the same locations and similar situations as the contemporary film. The question is if the concept of the film was built on the fact they had this archival footage, or if… Well, yeah, I think they looked at the world they built and wondered how they could tie it all together.

Which leads us to the meta. In modern times our duo are still on their quest to play some Toronto music venue called the Rivoli. Which is apparently what they’ve been trying to do since their Web series in 2008. That’s a long time to basically pine after a pipe dream. Because they aren’t even a band. In fact, only one of them even plays an instrument. Their whole schtick is just wanting to play the Rivoli because… I don’t know, honestly. But their efforts never involve practicing or actually writing music. Instead they just pull off elaborate schemes and stunts to get themselves booked. The first of which is a stunt to jump from the CN Tower into the SkyDome to… convince the Rivoli they can be a band? It’s absurd. The crazy part is, the film does that thing where it’s unclear what is fiction and what is kind of an elaborate version of gorilla indie filmmaking. They clearly snuck cameras into the CN Tower against the rules. They may or may not have jumped off the tower. And this happens a bunch of times throughout the movie where they blur the lines between who is an extra and who is just an unsuspecting member of the public. It’s a pretty incredible trick. But their next scheme, after the CN Tower thing goes sideways, is to show up claiming to be from the future to get themselves booked at the Rivoli.

And then comes the time travel. Which involves absolutely no science in its science fiction. Mostly it just involves a bottle of Orbitz — a gross gimmicky drink from the 90s that I encountered but definitely never bought. They reference Back to the Future and pretty much steal all the ideas from it. They don’t hide that fact, they come right out and lampoon it to some extent. The time travel thing turns into a whole Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure thing where they run into their younger selves and skulk around and end up changing their futures… Or maybe that’s not what happens to Bill and Ted, but something like that. There’s a kind of reverse It’s a Wonderful Life and any number of other things that what would happen if someone went back in time and somehow broke the relationship that was apparently holding someone back. It all becomes about this long-standing relationship between these two dreamers who are incredibly dedicated to one another and their totally stupid desire to play a venue that they could probably just walk into and do a bad open mic session. And it’s actually quite sweet. These two guys who could otherwise be douchey cartoonish pranksters are, in reality, dedicated bros for life. And their circular adventure amounts to nothing more than them realizing this fact. While their shared dream is pretty rote and goofy in its narrative, the way they get there is really clever from a filmmaking standpoint. Especially when you have a moment to sit back and think about how they stitched the thing together out of years of their relationship and a mixture of pranks and scripted narrative. I’m still wondering how they did some of the stunts and how they got away with using clearly copyrighted material on such a low budget. I know I’ve said it several times now, but “clever” really sums it up. And while I don’t generally watch movies just to watch them be clever, this is one that’s totally worth it.