‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’ Review: Cult Comedy Series Gets Big Screen Treatment in Glorious Copyright Nightmare
“Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” is the only movie playing SXSW 2025 that requires 17 years of context to fully appreciate. But man, it’s worth it.
For the uninitiated, Nirvanna the Band couldn’t have less to do with Kurt Cobain. Launched as a webseries in 2008, the ongoing comedy project stars Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol as fictional versions of themselves who are dying to break into the Toronto music scene. Specifically, they’re dying to play a show at a legendary club known as the Rivoli. The duo is so focused on landing a gig that they don’t have time to practice music. Instead, they spend every day engaging in complex publicity stunts that demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of the music industry and often end up mirroring tropes from classic films.
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The scale of the project has gradually expanded as it morphed from a DIY webseries to a Viceland show to the feature film that premiered this week, but the format remains the same. The two friends start their day sitting around a piano and brainstorming an idea for a scheme to play the Rivoli. A documentary crew then follows them as they try and execute their plan on the streets of Toronto, utilizing unknowing actors in a format that might be described as “Nathan for You” meets “This Is Spinal Tap.”
The joke only gets funnier the longer they remain unsuccessful. When we catch up with these aspiring rock gods, Matt has hatched a scheme that he believes is truly foolproof: the two men are going to buy tickets to the EdgeWalk experience that allows them to stand outside atop the CN Tower, sneak a pair of clippers into their pocket to cut the bungee cords on their harnesses, parachute into the SkyDome during the 7th inning of a Blue Jays game, and announce that they’re playing a show at the Rivoli that night. The excitement from fans will be so overwhelming that the venue will have no choice but to comply to avoid embarrassment.
The plan progresses farther than it should, with the friends succeeding in their attempt to parachute off the CN Tower. Unfortunately, they jump as the retractable roof is closing due to bad weather, trapping them on the roof and delaying their Rivoli debut another day. The failure prompts Jay to question whether he’d be better off pursuing a solo career, while Matt dives into a new plan that involves building a fake time machine in the RV they call home.
Catastrophe strikes the next day when Jay tries to sneak off to play an open mic in Ottawa by himself. While speeding at 88 miles an hour in the RV, he spills their last bottle of Orbitz, a vintage soda that billed itself as having “a bolt of lightning in every bottle,” on the time machine setup. The lightning makes the machine work, and they end up transported back to 2008. From there, they have to sneak back into their old apartment to find more Orbitz (which was already obsolete 17 years ago) to find another bottle that could help them get… back to the future.
At one point, Matt breaks the fourth wall and directly addressed the camera to declare that “this is gonna be a copyright nightmare.” He encourages anyone watching in a theater to cherish the experience, as they could be the last people to ever watch the film. The comments are presumably made in jest, but they come from a place of truth, as “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” lifts the plot of “Back to the Future” quite directly. Seemingly meaningless interactions with their past selves end up changing the present in massive ways, with Jay turning into the biggest pop star on the planet and Matt wasting away as a drummer in a Jay McCarrol cover band. With no more Orbitz, they have to rely on a lightning strike to get a final boost of time travel energy to restore their lives to normalcy.
“Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” delivers everything a fan of the show could want, expanding the level of spectacle while keeping the core of the ongoing project intact. Much of the show’s appeal stemmed from its sincerity, with the two friends engaging in boneheaded schemes that never work without ever being discouraged from following their dream. And while the film finds plenty of laughs at the characters’ expense, it offers some appropriately sentimental validation of an on-and-offscreen friendship that we’ve followed for nearly two decades.
This shouldn’t be the last we see of Nirvanna the Band, with the creators telling the SXSW audience that the film was designed to set up a third season of the show. But it offers enough narrative heft to justify a small group of fans’ endless support of the project, and would have been a fitting farewell if Matt and Jay were ready to hang things up. But the beauty of this story lies in its endlessness, and comedy fans should hope that Nirvanna the Band is unsuccessfully promoting gigs they don’t have for as long as the Rivoli is standing.
Grade: B+
“Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” premiered at SXSW 2025. Elevation Pictures will release the film at a later date.
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