Before we get too tangled in the myriad convolutions of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (now on Hulu), we need to engage in what I’ll dub the Orbitz Memory Jog: Orbitz was a gimmicky juice-like beverage with floating blobules in it that was produced by Clearly Canadian and was almost vaguely popular in the late ’90s — and then it was promptly discontinued. You might need to know that in order to properly engage with this movie, which spins off from TV series Nirvanna the Band the Show, which spun off from the web series Nirvana the Band the Show, all the brainchildren of Toronto-based musician-comedians Jay McCarrol and Matt Johnson. They play delusional weirdos Jay and Matt, members of two-man band Nirvanna the Band, and their only dream is to one day play Toronto music venue the Rivoli. Simple enough, but the movie these guys are in is anything but, being a farcical, ouroborosian comedy/time-travel adventure that incorporates guerrilla filmmaking, improvised bits with unsuspecting passersby and the amusingly clever piecing-together of footage shot as far back as 2008. In other words, brace yourselves for weirdness, my friends.
The Gist: It’s 2008. Matt and Jay play versions of themselves in their 20s, and they’re actually in their 20s. They are Nirvanna the Band, and they believe they can will themselves into landing a gig at the Rivoli. These guys are inseparable besties who, in 2025, still haven’t achieved that dream, and also who, in a sequence that’s kind of amazing because I don’t quite know how they did it, are about to parachute off the CN Tower into the Rogers Centre smack in the middle of a Blue Jays game, believing it’ll be so crazy that it’ll get them that Rivoli show. A thought: Have they considered playing shows and releasing songs to grow a fanbase, and maybe marketing themselves with funny Instagram videos? They never talk about that and we never see them do that and it’s probably hopeless because so many other bands do that with meager success so you understand why they’ve been desperate for 17 years, and all this is me applying logic where it’s surely not necessary, although there is some logic to it if you pretzelbrain yourself enough.
The sneaky genius of NtBtStM is, the real versions of Matt and Jay filmed the mostly fake (?) versions of themselves back in 2008, so they’re actually young in the footage. And the older real versions of Matt and Jay filmed themselves in 2025 playing older mostly fake (?) versions of themselves taking a time machine back to 2008 and interacting with the mostly fake (?) versions of their younger selves. Got that? It’s a modest marvel of editing, and damn clever retroactive writing to jerry-rig old footage into a new story like that. It’s also quite funny when the older mostly fake (?) versions of Matt and Jay are trapped in a closet listening to the younger mostly fake (?) versions of Matt and Jay rehearse the same song about cream corn and its nemesis, the can opener, for hours and hours and hours. The joke being, the ideal audience for Nirvanna the Band is primarily limited to the members of Nirvanna the Band.
But things are actually happening in this plot, and a big one is Jay’s plotting to go solo, as 17 years of endless dickery and twaddling have yielded nothing substantial beyond an ability to endure the more annoying member of Nirvanna the Band. Oh, and the deepening of their friendship, as the movie eventually explores, and rather tenderly, I might add. But that’s the Substance of a movie in which two Canadian yahoos discover that spilling Orbitz in the imitation flux capacitor in their RV allows them to time travel and parodize Back to the Future with a great and mighty lack of shame. And when they run out of Orbitz — there were limited supplies, considering its rather short run along the fringe of the zeitgeist — they have to figure out how to get back to two days in the past so they can do the ol’ space-time wormhole end-around to compensate for some horrible shit that happens. And for some reason, some of this involves occasionally effing with real randos on the street, in a hardware store, and way up on the CN Tower observation deck.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? NtBtStM is essentially Tenacious D’s Excellent Strange Brew Moviefilm Adventure. Oh, and if you like this type of deeply skewed weirdness, give The Napa Boys a try.
Performance Worth Watching: McCarrol pretty much plays the straight man to Johnson’s gregarious attention-hog wacko, so Johnson (perhaps better known as a film director whose work includes Blackberry and upcoming Anthony Bourdain biopic Tony) takes this accolade purely due to the nature of the character.
Sex And Skin: Nah.
Our Take: For those of us new to the Nirvanna cult, it takes a minute to acclimate to McCarrol and Johnson’s freewheeling zaniness. Namely, the first act, in which the CN Tower sequence takes place, making us think the film will be more heavily weighted with crazy guerilla-impov stuff, instead of the stuff of an endearingly ramshackle buddy comedy, e.g. seamlessly edited footage of younger Jay and older Matt having an amusingly awkward conversation. This is accompanied by a previous bit in which the characters acknowledge the cameraman following them around –—as they are wont to do, giving the film another layer of surreal self-awareness — and make him use an older camera so the new footage will match the grainy, cropped footage from 2008. There are jokes within jokes within jokes within jokes in this movie, and once you catch one, they start to tumble like comedy dominoes.
The film’s biggest joke is the implied, thematic one in which Jay and Matt go on a quest through time to find themselves in literal, psychological, and metaphorical ways. Perhaps the characters are too stupid and self-involved to notice, but it’s all there, and we get to witness it as the screenplay, such as it is, divides the duo and switches between their points-of-view in amusing ways. (Compare that to the Borat-ish people-on-the-street stuff, which is shoehorned in for reasons that elude me.) Granted, this kind of meta-comedy — much more clever than most self-aware, look-down-the-lens meta-comedy we see in something like Masters of the Universe — isn’t for everyone, and for those other everyones, maybe some of the lazier lookit-us-we’re-defying-copyright-laws Back to the Future references will hit for them. It’s all rather ridiculous, mind you. But for the niche who can adapt to NtBtStM’s wavelength, it’s a pretty good kind of ridiculous.
Our Call: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie the Review: STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
