Just how far would two undiscovered Canadian musicians go to book a show at the Rivoli, a Toronto club (and sometime music venue) best known for helping to launch comedy talents like Kids in the Hall back in the day?
Far and away the wildest film of the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival, “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” charts the crazy-long obsession of Canadian comic duo Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol to scheme their way onto the semi-famous stage — a low-hanging goal that supports some of the most high-concept mockumentary gags Canada has ever seen (not counting a mock politician’s suggestion that they become the 51st state). Call it “an adventure 65 million… er, 17 years in the making,” as the time-travel comedy represents Johnson’s dream project: a career-spanning goof that’s directly where the satirist’s mind went after the success of “BlackBerry” earned him carte blanche on his next project.
Initially conceived in 2007, half a decade before Johnson won Slamdance with “The Dirties,” the duo’s pop-culture-spouting, copyright-flouting web series (then spelled with one N) operated on a simple principle: As the only two in on the joke, Johnson and McCarrol would go out in character (as desperate, idiot versions of themselves) and involve the public in their sketches, à la Sacha Baron Cohen or Nathan Fielder. In the late 2010s, the pair expanded “Nirvanna” to an actual TV show, stepping up the lunacy of their shenanigans. Since this is a movie, everything has to be bigger and more ambitious, while still making sense for the vast audience who’ve never seen or heard of their earlier work (à la Tenacious D movie).
That explains why the film opens with the very first scene of the series — a perfect way to establish Matt’s delusions of grandeur, as he imagines the instant fame he and composer-pianist Jay would achieve, if audiences could only see their magic on stage. Right from the start, they were running to the whiteboard and brainstorming ways to get the Rivoli’s attention. Fast forward to 2025, and they’re no closer to that goal, though their plans have gotten infinitely more elaborate.
“Jay, I’ve figured it out!” Matt announces, pitching an idea where the two of them “skydive into the SkyDome” (the retractable roof of Rogers Centre) in the middle of a baseball game. It doesn’t get any crazier than that, and yet, the adorably naive Jay gamely agrees to go along with his harebrained buddy’s plan, which involves leaping off the top of downtown Toronto’s CN Tower into the open stadium.
The next thing we know, they’re buying supplies to cut the safety-harness cables and attempting to smuggle those clippers past the security guards at the entrance of the CN Tower EdgeWalk. As if it weren’t delicious enough watching Matt go back and forth through the metal detector, the bulky, parachute-shaped bulge under his blazer serves as the cherry on top of that gag.
One of the running jokes here is that Matt simply can’t keep quiet about his plans, spilling the beans to practically everyone they meet. It’s like watching Wile E. Coyote diagram his doomed-to-fail intentions, except that in this case, it means bouncing the ideas off of unsuspecting civilians — a strategy that elicits unpredictable reactions, while also making it easier for Johnson to complete the illusion that they actually followed through with their stunts via editing and effects.
For example, a Canadian Tire employee sounds genuinely skeptical (and concerned) about their parachute plans, but ultimately gives them his blessing: “You have the freedom to do this,” he shrugs. “I’m a Libertarian.” You simply can’t write a reaction like that, nor could you cast half the film’s supporting characters, whom DP Jared Raab is constantly filming from hidden spots, guerilla style. Audiences were a lot more receptive to the mock-doc format back in the aughts, when “The Office” was on TV, but it remains essential here, given the “Candid Camera”-esque dimension.
Jared soon becomes a character in the broader plot, as Matt’s next kooky marketing tactic — to retrofit their RV into a “Back to the Future”-style time machine — goes better than expected, transporting Jared and the two musicians back to 2008. As if one pop culture reference weren’t enough for the scene, Johnson doubles down by making a bottle of Orbitz blob-water integral to the story. The time machine won’t work unless they can track down another bottle of the long-since-discontinued Canadian beverage.
Such details give an idea of how silly the plot can get at times, and yet, beneath all the irony (including an overripe, Alan Silvestri-style orchestral score) and cartoonish schemes runs a sincere exploration of the pair’s friendship — specifically, what happens when the bond keeping Nirvanna the Band together reaches its breaking point. After so many years of going along with Matt’s ploys, Jay is ready to go solo. (If the movie lacks for anything, it’s the kind of original songs that come so easily to Trey Parker and Matt Stone.)
What better time to stage the end of a bromance than during a sneak screening of 2009 megahit “The Hangover”? Choosing an especially cringe-worthy scene to make his escape (a startling illustration of how badly that movie’s humor has aged), Jay disrupts the past just enough that he’s now one of Canada’s top celebrities in the 2025 they return to. Stranger things have happened … in the movies, at least, and “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” is nothing if not an homage to the lasting impact that junk culture can have on impressionable minds.
Haphazard as it’s all meant to seem, it takes a careful mix of planning and improvisatory skill to pull off, as the team works largely without permits. Hence, we get footage of Jay walking through the front gates of Drake’s House as if it were his own mansion, quickly followed by material captured by infiltrating a police press conference in the same upscale neighborhood. Hilarious as the movie can be, there’s an even more amusing meta-level on which we laugh at how insane it is that it exists at all, marveling how they pulled it off. To understand that, we’ll have to wait for “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie the Documentary.”
