One of the reasons I go to film festivals—perhaps at this point the main one—is to see movies the way they’re meant to be seen. I don’t mean dazzling images on a silver screen, although that part is nice, especially compared to the frequently undazzling presentation of my local multiplexes. I mean sitting in an audience full of people who are excited to be there, hungry to see something they’ve never seen before, and open to whatever that might be. I look forward to the movies, of course, but most of them will, in one form or another, be around six months later. The audiences, with rare exceptions, won’t.
On Thursday, there was no audience that I would rather have been a part of than the one for the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. It was, by film festival standards, not an especially star-studded affair: The closest thing to A-list talent were the stars of a cult 2000s web series turned cult 2010s TV show that has now further evolved into a delightfully odd feature film that could finally escape cult status when it’s released by Neon next year. (There were, in fact, bigger names in the audience: I was a few seats away from Cary Elwes, who was sitting next to the mayor of Toronto.) But the crowd that packed the 1,200-seat Royal Alexandra Theatre was electrified, and there was no resisting the charge.
In that room, at least, Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol were legends—not just local boys made good but native Canadians who staked out a career without pulling up stakes and moving to the U.S. (Johnson also directed 2023’s BlackBerry, about another pair of Ontario friends made good.) So while it had been nearly six months since Nirvanna had its world premiere at SXSW, its Canadian debut was still a thrilling, roof-shaking blast.
In Nirvanna the Band the Show, the name for The Movie’s predecessors, Johnson and McCarrol play Matt and Jay, respectively, two struggling musicians with their hearts set on booking a gig at Toronto’s Rivoli, a small rock club located, like many of the movie’s settings, within a 10-minute walk from the premiere. (They bear, of course, no relation to the grunge-rock trio from the Pacific Northwest, whose existence they seem unaware of.) It’s been nearly two decades since they first appeared on the internet, but that goal hasn’t changed, nor has their proximity to achieving it. Matt, the fedora-sporting schemer of the pair, hatches a new plan that involves climbing to the top of the CN Tower and skydiving into the SkyDome, landing on home plate and announcing to the crowd that they are playing at the Rivoli that night, thus forcing the venue to finally put them on the bill. (It’s an unspoken running gag that it never seems to occur to them to simply call and ask, or even practice playing so much as a single song.)
They appear, through a combination of apparently-for-real public stunts and (presumably) clever editing, to pull off at least the first part of their convoluted plan. But it doesn’t work, and for the first time, Matt and Jay are facing a genuine rift in their friendship: Nirvanna the band the breakup. That leads, in turn, through a series of events too ridiculous to relate here, to a Back to the Future–inspired caper that finds them coming face-to-face with their younger, more hopeful selves, then having to undo a rift in the timeline that somehow makes matters even worse.
Think Borat meets Flight of the Conchords and you won’t be far wrong, but there is something particularly, well, Canadian about the whole thing. Perhaps it’s the modesty of Matt and Jay’s dreams—it comes as no surprise that the Rivoli’s capacity is a mere 200 people, or that when a frustrated Jay decides to go out on his own, the most ambitious solo debut he can think of is playing an open mic night in Ottawa. (When the bar tells him over the phone that all he has to do is be there before 8 p.m., he excitedly replies, “So would you say I booked a show?”) Or maybe it’s the politeness: Even when they’re making a mad dash through a crowd to do their own small-scale version of saving the world, the pair keep yelling out “Sorry!”
As proudly provincial as Nirvanna the Movie is—there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sight gag about the disgraced CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi—I think it’ll play like gangbusters south of the 49th parallel. (Several people told me it killed in Austin.) You don’t need to be familiar with the intersection of Queen and Spadina to crack up at the idea of two middle-aged men talking as if making it there is the equivalent of summiting Everest. (It helps that Spadina, which rhymes with a part of the body, is an objectively excellent comedy word.) And you also don’t have to have familiarized yourself with the duo’s previous work, some of which is, and will likely remain, legally unavailable. By way of explaining why the web series is offline, McCarrol recalled, “We paid absolutely no attention to copyright law—there are Beatles songs in there!”
It’s probably true that no other crowd will laugh as hard at, or feel as validated by, a movie in which Queen Street trolleys play such a pivotal role. (Take that, Turning Red.) And there’s probably an extra kick involved in knowing that a scene set outside a rock star’s mansion was actually filmed at Drake’s house, where Johnson and McCarrol rushed to steal shots from a real-life press conference. Saying which press conference risks ruining what might be Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’s best gag, which had the audience laughing so loudly that it obscured a full minute of dialogue. But then, if you live here, you probably already know.
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