Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie The Review

The movies.

I’m a few weeks into a screenwriting course right now—because I’m in my early 30s and having yet another existential crisis—and I’ve been having a lot of trouble with it. I’m working on a short, and I have a basic idea, which I think is pretty fun, but it’s been kinda tough to motivate myself, because I feel like I’ve kinda trapped myself in a pretty closed-in plot.

Obviously, this is my first real attempt, so it’s not going to be perfect (unless it is…?), and it’s kind of tough to not be good at something that you really want to be good at. Especially when there are only a certain number of hours in a day, and I have a 9-5 and other things I want to get done at the same time.

In short, a good movie is a miracle, especially something as creatively unbound and comedically ridiculous as Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. It’s honestly an inspiration to see something so loose in tone while also being so stringent in terms of simple plot mechanics, while telling a heartwarming story through the most outlandish of means. An added bonus, it’s really nice to laugh in a theater with other people again.

I’ve seen this movie twice now on the big screen—and both times there was one scene in particular that damn near caused a riot. In a positive way, of course.

For those who don’t know (and this would’ve included me a few weeks ago), Nirvanna the Band the Show is a Canadian mockumentary sitcom based on a web series in which two struggling musicians come up with rash plans to play a show at their beloved Rivoli. The movie is just a slightly bigger version, but don’t worry. You don’t have to watch a second of the previous material to understand what’s happening and where things are going.

It’s a clear Back to the Future parody interspersed with Jackass. And, to be honest, I’m not sure how filmmaker and actor Matt Johnson, along with his trusted pianist Jay McCarrol, were able to make … any of this. It’s a copyright nightmare and a lawsuit waiting to happen, and it’s frankly inspirational for the duo to say fuck it and just film what they wanted to film and ask forgiveness later.

More than anything, this is the work of two guys who wanted to do something that they found funny and interesting and powered through what I’m sure was a near infinite amount of legal loopholes and people telling them that this was too convoluted an idea to ever work.

It’s sometimes tough to recommend a comedy because there’s less you can hold onto, other than retelling full scenes and botching how it all goes down. And yet, this is a plea to watch it, especially in theaters if you can, as we rarely get creativity like this mixed with honest-to-god masterful filmmaking and problem-solving.

When you have a staff writer at The Atlantic asking, “how on earth did they make this lol,” you know you’ve got some magic on your hands.

Or, there’s this write-up from Adam Nayman, which gets at the core of it: “Nirvanna the Band aren’t just inured to failure; they’re immersed in it as lifeblood, like dual Wile E. Coyotes who know, on some level, that the Road Runner is beyond their grasp.”

Going back to me for a second (sorry), it’s been tough to be able to balance a basic/generic-ish plot with characters that are a bit more complicated than pure NPCs. It’s not as if Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is reinventing the wheel, but it’s using the wheel as a jumping-off point of sorts to then tell a beautiful story about friendship and getting older and what it’s all about. It also involved manslaughter, jumping off the CN Tower and Bradley Cooper … because of course it does.

Anyway, it’s easily the best movie of the year so far. Would be shocked if it’s not in my top ten (probably even top five) by the end of 2026. And yes, I have seen Wuthering Heights.