Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is a fitting punchline to a long-running, ultra-Canadian joke
Matt Johnson's film is part warm nostalgia piece, part insider comedy, and entirely charming.
Photo: Neon
Ideally, everyone could see Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie in Toronto. Like director and co-writer Matt Johnson’s 2023 film BlackBerry, Nirvanna embraces its Canadianness in a way that other Canadians can sometimes find flabbergasting. Americans are used to celebrating ourselves and our country, whether we deserve the accolades or not. The same is less true of our Northern neighbors, to the extent that even this seemingly warm hug of a tribute to the city of Toronto has a self-deprecating edge to it.
The character Johnson plays in Nirvanna—first a web series, then a sitcom on the now-defunct Viceland channel, now a film picked up for distribution by Neon—would be cringeworthy, were it not also self-parody. “Matt” is an immature loser in the eternal-child mold, the kind of guy who wakes up every morning determined to impose his sense of whimsy onto everyone around him, by force if necessary. Luckily for him, his piano-playing straight-man cohort “Jay” (co-writer and composer Jay McCarrol) is usually up for an adventure. However, as the film begins, Jay’s tolerance for Matt’s nonsense is starting to wear thin.
It’s been 17 years, after all, since Matt and Jay began their Sisyphean quest to book a show at the Rivoli, a Toronto club with a capacity of 230 and a long history within the Canadian alt-comedy scene. Rather than, say, actually write some songs or call the manager or send an inquiry email, the duo embarks on a series of outrageous attention-seeking gambits in hopes that, if they tell enough people that they’re playing at the Rivoli that night, the club will have no choice but to book them. It never works, but they keep trying, on and on for nearly two decades.
The film version of Nirvanna opens with one of these schemes, in which Matt and Jay decide to parachute off of the CN Tower and onto the field at a Toronto Blue Jays game, where they’ll grab a mic from…somewhere and pitch their show to thousands of confused baseball fans. The sequence that follows exemplifies the clever blend of man-on-the-street reality and sleight-of-hand fiction that fuels Matt and Jay’s exploits: First, the guys go into a real Canadian Tire store and describe their plan to a skeptical employee, who tells them that he doesn’t think it’s a good idea to jump off of the tower, but if they’re going to do it, this is the brand of pliers that he recommends.
