Of all the widely released films of 2026 so far, not many have a barrier to entry as high as the fittingly ludicrously titled Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. To even know what you’re looking at when you see the poster you’d need to be well-versed in the Canadian alt-comedy scene or at least an avid fan of Vice back in the early 2010s. A self-published webseries that became a full TV show that is now a movie where the two main characters are fictionalised versions of the actors playing them and the fourth wall barely exists, if you bounce off it, you’ll bounce off it *hard*. If you can embrace it, though, it’s one of the year’s funniest and most audacious films, even if, like me, you’re coming into it relatively cold.
Matt Johnson (who also directs and writes) and Jay McCarroll (who also writes and composes the music) star as Matt and Jay, a pair of Toronto musicians who, for nearly 20 years by the time the film kicks off, have been trying and failing to get a gig at The Rivoli theatre in the city. The latest insane scheme from Matt involves skydiving from the CN Tower in a real ‘how the *hell* did they pull that off?’ set piece but fails yet again to get them any media attention. So, he builds a fake time machine to try his next plan; pretending to be a time-traveller. After spilling a bottle of Orbitz (a cult discontinued Canadian soft drink) on the machine, though, it suddenly, accidentally, becomes a functional time machine, depositing our heroes back in 2008, where they try to remake their futures.
Mixing footage from the present and 2008, NTBTSTM is, purely as a feat of editing and invisible/seamless VFX work, colossal. Matt and Jay have conversations with their younger selves (as in, the actual younger Johnson and McCarroll) that, impossibly, feel as if they had been scripted this way all along, rather than mashed up from two sets of footage almost two decades apart. These blurred lines are everywhere, the handheld cameras allowing for guerrilla, prank show-esque, permitless filming involving members of the public as well as conventionally scripted scenes, but even these ‘man on the street’ moments oscillate between genuine strangers and planted cast members with a dizzying fluidity.
Reality becomes what Johnson and McCarroll make it and while that can drift the story into territory so silly that genuine tension or stakes become impossible, it is mostly just very funny. NTBTSTM is joyfully joke-dense in its ode to friendship and delusional creativity (not to mention the cultural chasms between now and 2008), while the grandest comic set-pieces are stunning in their logistical ambition, the sheer audacity becoming just as fun as the actual gags.
This is a deeply *particular* movie, and I’m sure I’d have liked it even more if I had been more familiar with Johnson and McCarroll’s work going in (or if I was Canadian), but, even with most of this being new to me, it left me with a pretty consistent grin on my face. Funny, crazy, and even very sweet when it wants to be, it’s the culmination of a specific, committed comic vision (Johnson and McCarroll, of course, have a perfect chemistry by this point) that has been going on since before Obama took the White House and there really isn’t anything else like it.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 