“Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” opens with a prank that’s also a leap of faith. The question of just how far the eponymous indie-rock duo embodied for two decades by Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol — as ever, playing themselves under their own names — are willing to go to become almost-famous jostles against the metafictional methodology of their feature movie debut.
Suffice it to say that 1,100 feet straight up represents a pretty dizzying height from which to suspend the audience’s collective disbelief. The prologue is “Jackass” by way of James Bond. It’s hard to say that filmmakers don’t walk the walk when they’re on the observation deck of the CN Tower.
From there, there’s nowhere to go but down. “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” is pretty much as funny as advertised — and it arrives duly hyped after a rapturous premiere at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival. It’s also more melancholy than expected.
Matt and Jay have been at this for 18 years, beginning with a cult web series and extending to a professionally produced (but still ramshackle) faux-reality television show. Amid the usual repertory of slapstick sight gags, guerrilla-style mischief and pop-cultural riffage, the movie version is pressurized by a sense of mid-life crisis. What does it mean, existentially, to be pushing 40 and still wearing an ironic fedora?
By way of recap for the uninitiated — and make no mistake, the challenge of marketing an extended in-joke to a mass audience is baked into the material — Matt and Jay’s friendship was originally forged in their mutual desire to play a show at the venerable Queen Street West performance space known as the Rivoli.
Back in 2007, the joke was that they were upstarts, trying to book a gig. The movie picks up in 2025, when, apparently, they’re still at square one. Hence the scheme to skydive off the CN Tower and into Rogers Centre, which Matt, in his perennial capacity as frontman-slash-idea-man, believes will get the attention of the Rivoli’s bookers (a bit like John Hinckley Jr. figured shooting at Ronald Reagan might impress Jodie Foster).
Jay, who composes and plays piano, knows it’s a stupid plan, though no stupider maybe than any of his platonic life partner’s other plans, but goes along anyway, mostly out of routine. Nirvanna the Band aren’t just inured to failure; they’re immersed in it as lifeblood, like dual Wile E. Coyotes who know, on some level, that the Road Runner is beyond their grasp.
Cue the arrival — on schedule and mostly inexplicably, like everything else in the Nirvanna universe — of a homemade time machine, modelled on (and functionally identical to) the one used by Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly in “Back to the Future.”
Recapping precisely the purposes to which Matt and Jay, separately and together, and also intentionally and not, use this science-fictional device is beside the point. Suffice it to say that the storyline traffics in the same impressively precise, carefully jerry-rigged stupidity as the web series and TV show, in addition to duplicating the familiar hand-held, faux-verité esthetic.
What matters is that the time-travel conceit allows Johnson and his collaborators, including the superlative editor Curt Lobb, who also cut Johnson’s Canadian Screen Award-winning “BlackBerry,” to play all kinds of funny games with both vintage early-2000s and present-tense footage of the actors, as well as the city. Johnson’s commitment to having Toronto play itself, and using the city and its inhabitants variably as foils, witnesses and accomplices in his shtick, has positioned him as a kind of local hero, albeit one whose civic pride is filtered through a solipsistic prism.
As a character, Matt is defined by an inability to think of people other than himself, including Jay, whose fatigue at being an eternal sidekick is palpable. The time machine presents him with a literal vehicle for emancipation, and he takes the wheel, with real consequences for both men. Like any good buddy comedy, “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” has been designed so that the same solidarity taken for granted by the characters and the audience is hanging in the balance.
Or maybe not: the inverse ratio between the crazy convolutions of the storyline and the (relatively) low stakes at the other end underlines the point(lessness?) of the entire exercise. Maybe it’s better to say that what’s really at stake in “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” is the potential gentrification of a local intellectual property, such as it is. Matt and Jay will never play the Rivoli, but they’ve made it to the multiplex, and on their own lo-fi, deceptively lowbrow terms.
As the film’s final images suggest, hope springs eternal.
