Review | “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” smells like hometown spirit
Photo by Easton Clark, Photo Editor
Opening with a loving city symphony of contemporary Toronto set to a Ben Folds song, “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” confidently announces itself as a broad comedy of hometown indie proportions. That is until they build a — ahem — time machine and return to… 2008 Toronto? It’s a great reversal, and the first of many.
Indeed, the hometown spirit is so strong that our intrepid indie film legends, Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, only end up taking their time machine down memory lane. No killing baby Hitler, no dawn of man gags, Matt and Jay are so delusionally committed to headlining a modest local concert venue called The Rivoli that all they can think to do with their gadget is give it another shot, or at least help their past selves get there.
The thing is, after 17 years, their band still doesn’t have its act together. Musical manchild roommates, Matt and Jay are compelling as refreshing variations on millennial slacker types, putting their TV and internet-haunted sensibilities to fantastical comedic effect.
Thankfully, the film doesn’t take its time travel mechanics too seriously and qualifies them by leaning on footage Matt and Jay shot in 2008. This was quite moving, besides being plainly impressive, because shooting a portion of a movie 17 years in advance is both unprecedented and, in essence, real time travel.
And while it's undeniably funny to use a flux capacitor only to return to a year as recent as 2008, once you’re taken back, it really couldn’t feel further from the present. Fedoras, lowrise jeans and Blackberrys abound in low resolution camcorder footage as our heroes are given an opportunity to reflect on how little they’ve changed.
Despite being the catalyst for the rest of the film, this nostalgic return to the aughts doesn’t stick around. Before too long we’re transported to an alternate present and follow the pair as they frantically try to return to 2008 for most of the picture.
It’s unfortunate more couldn’t be mined from the past, but we can’t give 2008 Matt and Jay too much grief. As French New Wave director Jacques Rivette once said, "every film is a documentary of its own making,” and the film makes it clear that we should be proud of 2008 Matt and Jay for shooting anything so cohesive. This sort of super reflexive self-deprecation is much of the film’s charm.
However, some of this ingenious filmmaking is suffocated by endless references and so much intellectual property that a fourth wall break joke has to be made. Despite owning it, one does have to wonder if this reliance on pop culture references is lazy work. In one example, instead of inventing their own time travel method, the VHS-brained millennials copy the time machine from “Back To The Future” and install it in their RV. The memes are fun, but the filmmakers lean on them in a way that doesn’t feel far afield of the characters’ own arrested development. After all, their band is named after a much, much bigger band that already exists.
I found the best part of the film to be the mixed media approach that combines, as previously mentioned, camcorder footage from 2008, modern video, GoPro footage and even CCTV to execute stunts and gags in public, interacting with real Toronto residents for some of the film’s bigger laughs. Matt and Jay even do bits with their two cameramen, hilariously confusing them between timelines.
This overload of angles and formats embodies a new, contemporary realism where it is not unusual to have multiple cameras trained on one’s every action. Matt and Jay, as filmmakers, have been exploring this approach for over a decade with their webseries“Nirvana The Band The Show”, of which the film is a continuation, and use it to recreate the sensation of existing simultaneously online and in person, though to what end I’m not sure.
Presented in an aspect ratio of 16:9, there are times “Nirvanna” feels like the greatest YouTube video of all time rather than a movie, and perhaps some of the appeal lies in the novelty of seeing a goofy YouTube video con its way into a sizable production budget and onto the silver screen.
At the end of the day, “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” is a loving ode to a specific cohort of millennial Canadians whose joie de vivre should be studied by many a contemporary doomer. The main characters are manchildren and slackers, but who are we to criticize them for their lifestyle? They have goals, fun and, being caricatures of the actors themselves, have found contentment in a capital-C Crazy world by sticking together.
Of all the film’s highs, there were few that compared to the true uplift of watching Matt run through the streets of Toronto, repeating the famed Canadian “sore-ree” to every pedestrian he passes. This is a funny, good movie made by good people about being good to each other.
