THE STORY – When their plan to book a show at the Rivoli goes horribly wrong, Matt and Jay accidentally travel back to the year 2008.
THE CAST – Matt Johnson & Jay McCarrol
THE TEAM – Matt Johnson (Director/Writer) & Jay McCarrol (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 95 Minutes
There’s a small stretch of Queen Street West in Toronto that’s the stuff of Rock and Roll dreams. A bit north there’s the famous El Mocambo, where hundreds of bands would regularly play, like The Rolling Stones. The band also regularly played the Horseshoe when rehearsing for a tour, and the likes of Neil Young often show up for secret screenings, while major stars like Radiohead, The Police, and The Talking Heads played early gigs there. Then there’s The Rivoli. Since its opening in the early 1980’s, it’s always hosted a mix of musical and comedic events. This is where The Kids in the Hall held residence, and where a waiter with a thick accent became the basis for Mike Myers’ Dieter character on “SNL.” Meanwhile, numerous musicians have called it their home for the night, from Adele to Beck to The Flaming Lips, each invited to be part of a decades-long legacy of performances at the venue.
One band that has never played the Rivoli is Nirvanna The Band. The subject of their repeated failure at actually securing a gig at the venue was captured in the show called, appropriately, “Nirvanna The Band The Show.” Matt (Matt Johnson) and Jay (Jay McCarrol), the mouthpiece and the pianist, eschew regular means of accomplishing the task of booking a gig, instead relying upon guile and overly complex plans to somehow will the universe into acquiescing into an evening on that storied stage. With “Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie,” the stakes remain the same, but this time Matt and Jay have messed not only with the vagaries of show business booking procedures, they’ve also twisted the time continuum and borrowed liberally from other famous film plots along the way. The year is 2025 and the two are still perambulating down Queen Street pensively, looking for a means to finally secure that long-sought Rivoli gig. Their first plan is to jump off the CN Tower (that tall, pointy thing in all those Torontonian skylines shots) and land into the open roof of the neighbouring baseball stadium as a means of promoting their yet-to-be-booked gig. What could go wrong?
When that plan fails, unsurprisingly yet spectacularly, they decide on something even more challenging: cloning the flux capacitor from “Back to the Future’s” DeLorean time machine and installing it in the band’s decrepit RV. Thanks in part to a fad liquid from the early ‘90s, they manage to travel at 88 km/h and do the seemingly impossible. No, they haven’t booked a gig, but they do travel back to a time when Bill Cosby was celebrated on the front page print edition of the local arts paper Now Magazine, Jian Ghomeshi was hosting CBC radio’s Q program before his eventual downfall for sexual impropriety, and the younger versions of Matt and Jay are walking up and down Queen Street, putting up posters and scheming their way into getting that gig.
The result borrows heavily from the Zemeckisverse, naturally, but what gives the film much of its spark is its knowing winks to the camera about how preposterous it all is. Shot in the same documentary style as the show, the film nonetheless amps up the production values in ways both subtle and overt, making everything from the fall from the tower to the RV racing through city streets feel appropriately big budget.
The integration of footage shot decades apart is done exceptionally well, belying the haphazard and seemingly improvised nature of the proceedings and recognizing the great amount of care and craft required to pull of this particular magic act. Even the most spoof-ridden elements are done with a keen eye, bouncing back and forth between time periods in ways both comical and anxiety inducing. If anything, the film is a clear indication that behind the stupidity there are creative minds that always had a plan to make this chapter of Matt and Jay’s excellent adventure a reality, and we as audiences are the beneficiaries of being alive to witness the end result.
This is silliness done smartly, and rather than simply revelling in the mode of referencing other legendary films, Johnson and his team of collaborators do wonders to make things feel as authentic as possible. This is a hyper localized vision of Toronto, but its goofiness of circumstance and gormlessness of character is clearly universal in scope. While the show itself often spoofed other elements of popular culture, the direct integration of “Back to the Future’s” entire shtick is quite amusing, and there’s a playful sense throughout that despite the obvious case for fair use, it still feels that we as audience members are watching filmmakers get away with something illicit.
Following the international success of their last project “Blackberry,” itself a sublime rumination upon the rise and fall of that iconic Canadian tech giant, the filmmakers choosing to revert back to the zaniness of Nirvanna felt on paper to be a step back in time, and not in an appealing, Marty McFlyian way. Yet, implausibly, Johnson and his team have managed to inject some of the more nuanced elements of their smartphone film into this bonkers story of friendship, striving, ambition and aging. It’s this manifold aspect of the film, from broadly comedic to genuinely moving at times, that makes watching Nirvanna’s antics far more than just an exercise in giddily watching the consistent futility of their mission. The travails of these two friends are pathetic in both the technical and common use of that term, engendering actual pathos for these two nitwits, but laughing at them as much as feeling their pain when they fail again and again.
I have no time machine to be able to predict whether “Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie” is the final chapter for these two, but as a capper on a childhood goof that has expanded into cinematic scope it’s not a bad way to call it quits and to move on. Whether you’re a fan of the original or simply coming in from the cold to witness hijinks gone awry, there’s plenty to drink out of the fount of this footage, even if there’s weird floaty bits in the oblong bottle that makes the consumption just a wee bit disconcerting. In this version of our timeline, that’s more than enough to entertain.
