“Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” (2025) is the culminating effort of a creative endeavor that Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol have committed to for nearly two decades, as they first appeared as fictionalized versions of themselves in 2007 when their web series first debuted. That history is not necessary to understand the narrative of the film, but it does explain the unusual blend of satire, improv, and parody that makes “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.”
It’s a situational comedy about the double-edged sword of making choices, and one willing to use structural hijinks for the sake of reiterating jokes and complicating each set piece. Even though it’s not hard to root for a film that is so obviously a labor-of-love made by two friends who risked ridicule and copyright infringement to make their magnum opus, “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” is quite simply one of the funniest films in recent years.
Johnson and McCarol, who have now become more or less synonymous with their alternative “Matt and Jay” personas, have held a lifelong obsession with playing at The Rivoli, a renowned performance venue and restaurant in their hometown of Toronto. The Rivoli’s changing role within Canadian history, as it was once thought of as nothing but a hipster venue, doesn’t necessarily change the hilarity of Matt and Jay’s obsession.
Rather than learning how to perfect an act or form the necessary connections needed to book the space, Matt is convinced of a plan to hijack the stage through the use of an ascent off of The Skydome over Rogers Centre. After the stunt fails and he’s desperate to find out where he went wrong, Matt accidentally time-travels back to 2008, where both he and Jay are faced with younger versions of themselves.
The joke-to-minute ratio in “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” is higher than most contemporary comedies because of the authenticity of the main duo’s dynamic. These are characters who are constantly undercutting one another, blurring the line between the different roles they hold within the production of the film. It’s established within the story that the camera operator, Jared (Jared Raab), is recording footage, which may explain the way that Matt and Jay are acting in order to maintain their own records.
At the same time, these are characters that have an inherent obliviousness to them that makes it harder to discern what the calculated punchlines are. Matt is often so caught up in his own schemes that he narrates for an absent audience, and Jay finds amusement in disparaging his best friend’s impossible aspirations.
“Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” also has another degree of satire baked in with its fourth wall breaks. Although Johnson and McCarroll’s work has always relied on “hidden camera” techniques used to capture idiosyncrasies of human behavior that could never be orchestrated ahead of time, the film goes a step further in its meta references to the miraculous nature of its own construction.
Despite how obtuse, perhaps unwillingly, Matt and Jay are to the popular culture of the current moment, “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” is in conversation with the radical shifts within public attention and attitude since 2008, the year that they travel back to. While there’s no unneeded attention called to some of the more subtle jokes hidden within the background of each shot, there’s a surprisingly meticulous level of production design needed to represent the not-so-distant past.
The synthesis of improvisation, authentic bystander reactions, and narrative staging is not necessarily an original one, as there have been multiple attempts to crack the formula in the aftermath of “Borat.” What “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” succeeds in is mining the most out of its charmingly low-budget parameters. There’s a slow-motion, black-and-white device used to stage flashbacks that is not only genuinely lo-fi but reveals a hidden genius to the banter between Matt and Jay.
By finding multiple takes of a similar moment, the film is able to authentically replicate the way conversations played out from multiple perspectives. It doesn’t hurt that even the most absurd subjects of “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” have the same sense of chaotic energy. The suggestion that Matt and Jay are only slightly concerned about the ramifications of time travel is a particularly amusing running gag.
The “Back to the Future” homages, which are innumerable, manage to find new jokes within a property that has been endlessly parodied across the last four decades, and don’t fall into the nostalgia-bait “reference humor” that has been growingly popular within the last decade. In fact, the most charming aspect of “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” is how little the characters have changed over the course of their careers, as even the notion of playing The Rivoli is derived from the aspirations of younger musicians.
The blend of pathetic obsession and admirable sincerity is essential to why the core relationship works so well. Matt may be ignorant of how he’s been running in circles, but Jay’s notion of artistic superiority is just as feeble. That “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” is able to acknowledge how their friendship has made this entire phenomenon possible, all without feeling saccharine, is a feat that is almost unheard of in contemporary comedy.
While “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” could have easily been a bunch of loosely connected candid moments, the film is not lacking in edgier humor, even if it’s rarely mean-spirited. The chaos that comes with changing the altered timelines leads to a complication within Matt and Jay’s relationship, as at any moment, they could be playing various iterations of themselves. Although there are plenty of fun surprises that are played for appropriate shock value, “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” retains as much internal logic as could be asked of a film that is reliant on a bottle of Orbitz being spilled as an inciting incident.
“Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” is a celebration of the DIY sensibilities of young filmmakers cutting their teeth and striking out on their own, but it’s also one of the smartest, most deliberately pointed genre riffs in years. Johnson and McCarrol may profess to be getting older and not wiser, but in the case of “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” they’ve never been funnier.
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