Now Playing: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

Hi,

There are three movies showing at the Ross right now. The John Prine tribute concert film, which is continuing for a second week. Natchez, a documentary about the eponymous town in Mississippi. (I grew up in Mississippi and have visited Natchez and do plan to see this, though I don't know if I'll have time to review it here.) And finally, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, which I've reviewed below.

The tl;dr: Go see it! Go see it! Go see it!

Judging from the previews I saw at the Ross, there are also a few cool things on the horizon, including:

• A five-film limited series showcasing the work of Omaha-born director Joan Micklin Silver. The Ross will screen one of her films every day from Wednesday, April 8 to Sunday, April 12.
• Billy Preston: That's The Way God Planned It, which opens April 3.
• The President’s Cake, which opens April 3.
• Fantasy Life, which opens April 10.
• Mr Nobody Against Putin, the Oscar-winning documentary, which opens April 17.

I'm sending this review later than I planned because last night I decided to go see a screening of Project Hail Mary, which I really disliked and also ended at like 1 am. Alas.

During the opening scene of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, director Matt Johnson — who also plays a fictionalized version of himself — proclaims: "What you're about to see, you've never seen before."

In context, Matt is rehearsing an imaginary opening to a hypothetical show at The Rivoli for a nonexistent crowd. But for the film's audience (at whom the comment is also clearly aimed) the statement is false, or at least deeply ironic. That's because there's a lot here that you — observant moviegoing consumer of pop-culture that you are — have probably seen before. (To name just one example: Nirvanna the Movie is a self-conscious riff on Back to the Future and steals so many things from the series that, at one point, Matt turns to the camera and deadpans: "This is going to be a copyright nightmare.")

However, Matt's comment was, in one important respect, literally true for me.

I had zero — and I do mean zero — familiarity with the cult web series (and later TV show) that gave birth to Nirvanna the Movie. It's not just that I had no emotional connection to the source material; I didn't even realize it existed. Going in, I knew exactly two things about the film: That it features time travel, and that people whose taste I trust were raving about it. I'm not sure if this made me the best possible or the worst possible audience. But I do know that I really enjoyed myself.

Nirvanna the Movie is the funniest thing I've seen in theaters in a long time and, to my mind, is probably best enjoyed with a roomful of other people. (I hope it has a long afterlife as the kind of film you throw on when you're getting stoned with the guys/gals.) I'm sure my ignorance of Nirvana the Band (the web series) means I missed some callbacks and in-jokes. But that didn't matter! As I learned later, the opening scene is itself a callback. The footage is recycled from the very first scene of the web series (which I have now mostly watched), and it was still hilarious without that context.

You could argue the entire film is, in some sense, one giant callback. The same comedy bit that powers each episode of the show — that Matt and his best friend Jay (played by actor, musician, and Johnson's real-life best friend Jay McCarrol) are trying to book a show at The Rivoli — also drives the plot of the film. But there's a twist: Nirvanna the Movie is less about the comedy antics of failing to play at the Rivoli and more about the personal and artistic consequences of leaning on the same joke for 17 years.

After the first two scenes, which take place in 2008, there's a hard cut to the present, and we see a much older Matt and Jay still grinding, still executing the former's insane schemes to get themselves a show. "As far as I'm concerned, we're playing the Rivoli tonight," Matt says, after describing a promotional stunt that involves skydiving from the CN Tower into the middle of a Toronto Blue Jays game. (Not really a spoiler: The plan fails.)

However, Matt's plans clearly aren't as much fun as they were when the pair were in their 20s. In a moment of clarity, Jay realizes the two men have become middle-aged losers who live in filth, have accomplished nothing, and are crushed by financial debt. (There's a great shot of a crumpled letter from the Canadian government showing that one or both of the men owe $76k in unpaid taxes.) Jay decides it's time to split up the band and pursue a solo career as a musician, but before he can actually manage that, the two accidentally send themselves back to 2008 and — as you'd expect from a time travel story — interact with their past selves in ways that alter the future. When Matt and Jay finally stumble back to the present, their lives have changed in ways both funny and tragic, and they have to decide how and whether to fix things, including their friendship.

In some ways, Nirvanna the Movie is a story about the perils of coasting on creative nostalgia. It shows what it's like to tread and retread the same comedic ground over and over again, squeezing everything you possibly can out of the material until you find yourself literally moving backwards through time. It almost doesn't matter that Matt rigs their RV into a DeLorean-style time machine because he and Jay are spiritually stuck in 2008. But the movie works because it acknowledges and confronts this fact and, in doing so, finds a way to become its own new thing.

(At least I think it does. Any fans who have seen the original series, please weigh in!)

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~ Ty