Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie the Review!

By Chris Knight

Rating: A

If you’re a fan of the 2008 mockumentary web sitcom Nirvana the Band the Show, or its 2017 spiritual successor, Viceland’s Nirvanna the Band the Show — both about a couple of guys who just want to play a show at Toronto’s Rivoli — then prepare to fall in love with 2025’s big-screen version, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.

If you’re not at all familiar with the originals, but you know and/or love Back to the Future, that should be enough to guarantee you a good time at this almost-lawsuit-worthy homage/parody to the 1980s time travel classic. And if perchance you already love both Nirvanna and BTTF, then strap in, because when this movie hits 88 kilometres an hour…

Like its small- and computer-screen predecessors, the film version stars its co-creators, Matt Johnson (also directing) and Jay McCarrol, playing fictionalized versions of themselves. Like their younger, spryer selves, all they want is to play at the Rivoli. (Thank heavens the century-old establishment exists in all three time periods.)

They think they have a plan — OK, Matt thinks they have a plan; Jay has always played the cynical straight man — to gain notoriety (and a gig) by skydiving off the CN Tower and into the Rogers Centre. And, like every other one of their harebrained schemes, it almost works.

Matt’s next great idea is to trick out their RV like the DeLorean from that other movie, with the time circuits built into the vehicle’s fridge. (Fun fact: Back to the Future’s original screenplay imagined a fridge rather than a car as the device for travelling through time.) He’ll trick the Rivoli’s management into letting them play there to save the spacetime continuum. Or something.

Anyway, the plan fails because the time machine works, sending Matt and Jay back to the year 2008 and a collision course with themselves.

The film has great fun reminding us of public figures and casual slurs that passed muster not so long ago, before turning its attention to goofier matters — namely, Matt and Jay needing to infiltrate their own apartment to pilfer a discontinued Canadian soda brand called Orbitz from their younger selves.

Need I tell you that generational shenanigans ensue, including copyright infringement? If you thought Marty McFly was ballsy to steal Johnny B. Goode from Chuck Barry, wait ‘til you see what Jay gets up to.

Along the way, the boys remain obsessed with playing the Rivoli, and willing to do whatever it takes, breaking laws constitutional, commercial, paradoxical, physical and even narrative. It’s all in good fun, and it’s all very, very funny.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Directed by Matt Johnson. Starring Matt Johnson, and Jay McCarrol. In theatres February 13.