TIFF Review: Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (Matt Johnson)

The “M” in Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie should stand for Maturity. In it Matt even goes to see a movie and in it someone says, “Why can’t your friends be as mature as you?” 

But what exactly is maturity for the Nirvanna series?

A first point would be an evolution of their comedy. 

When Matt ends up accidentally travelling back in time to 2008 – the year him and Jay first hatched their dream to play a show at The Rivoli – and goes to see The Hangover, he finally realises that his Orbitz-infused time-travel RV really worked as the slurs in the film are laughed at by the audience (which from the perspective of 2025 hindsight we now understand as insensitive). There’s this same refinement of humour that crosses the series, almost as if Nirvanna was a barometer of our times.

I think it was David Lynch that said that comedy is about “timing” and after years of trying to describe the Nirvanna series as about these two hapless but good-hearted musicians trying to get a show at The Rivoli, I think now it might be more appropriate to describe it as about them not trying to get that show. Because it’s becoming clear – after a web-series, two tv seasons, and now a movie – that if they really wanted to book a show there then it would have already happened

There’s also the maturity of their style. There’s been a long gestation and development process for the film to come into being after the finale of Season 2 in 2018. And with this the question of taking the series to the big screen became essential: What raw material was there to sculpt to do justice to the change of scale?

There was always something democratic about the Nirvanna series: no matter who you were – class, race, age –, if you were lucky enough to be around them, while they were filming in Toronto, you could make it into the show. After Wonderland, the ROM and the underground tunnels of the city – among many other wonderful local sites – they had to dream bigger, so they looked up: the CN Tower.

The beautiful premise of The Movie is that their new effort to get a show at The Rivoli involves skydiving off of the CN Tower to land in the Rogers Centre field during a Jays game to announce to the crowd their performance. But they end up going too late in the day and they don’t make it as its rooftop was closing due to poor weather conditions. So their genius idea? Create a time-machine to re-start the day so that they can go earlier on so that their leap is successful.

After Drake got onto the top of the Tower for his Views (2016) album cover, the Nirvanna guys had to out-do him and show us their spin on the city’s iconic tower. It’s insane and I’m sure illegal all that they were able to film there. But that’s why you love it: They have a way of turning Toronto into this exciting playground and lovingly shows its idiosyncratic character, returning it to the people.

They’re creating an image of Toronto that feels truer than anything else, which is especially meaningful as no one else seems willing to do it (or even can).

It’s interesting to note that at the TIFF premieres yesterday, the prime minister Mark Carney (not a cinephile) was at the John Candy documentary, and that the mayor of Toronto Olivia Chow was at Nirvanna. Real ones know.

One last point in terms of maturity. 

There’s a new darkness in The Movie that wasn’t readily there in the previous work. The cinematographer Jared Raab films Jay in these high-contrast shadows. At the start, when Jay is contemplating leaving Matt and is driving to have his solo debut at the Lafayette in Ottawa, there’s almost a violence and pain in how he’s presented. It reminded me of some of Rembrandt’s late self-portraits or Tom Stern’s work with Clint Eastwood. Engulfing its two heroes in shadows culminates in a memorable scene that I’m still thinking about as there’s something so indelible and mysterious about it: After connecting a power-cord from the top of the CN Tower to a plug outlet at the corner of Queen and Spadina, so that when lightning strikes they can re-charge their DeLorean-style time machine, Matt gets incinerated when it finally hits and leaves only his trademark fedora in the wake. From being obfuscated in shadows to fully disappearing, I feel like there’s something significant taking place there.

There’s still lots to say about the Nirvanna movie: Johnson continues his archeology of film history, foraging from other films on day-dreamer musicians and ambitious rock stars – here Back to the Future – and putting them into the Nirvanna cannon (the film is full of other great Toronto cinephile culture references too – hell, I’m even in it!). The special effects of Tristan Zerafa are really impressive, seamlessly making all of these wild stunts believable. Curt Lobb does wonders editing, making the old and new footage go perfectly together. And we finally find out the inspiration for the Brave Shores track Never Come Down.

There’s still much to think about Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie and I suspect it’ll only keep sharing with us its mysteries in the years to come.