The Canadian writer-director-actor-conceptualist Matt Johnson has used the goodwill occasioned by his leftfield tech tale BlackBerry to revive an old pet project. First launched in 2007 as a webseries and later promoted to cable television, Nirvanna The Band The Show was a shuffling postmodern sitcom that tracked two would-be creatives - trilby-sporting schemer Matt (Johnson, playing a flailing version of himself) and tagalong musician pal Jay (Jay McCarrol) - as they pottered around the streets of their native Toronto trying to catch a break, tailed by much the same diegetic camera crew as could be spotted in such millennial mock-docs as The Office and Parks & Rec. This new big-screen variation on a theme actually opens with unused footage of Matt and Jay as they were in 2008, hatching a plan for their band Nirvanna (the spelling or misspelling goes unexplained, but somehow feels pertinent) to headline local nitespot the Rivoli. Cut to: Matt and Jay in the same place in 2025, older and broader in the beam, but no closer to achieving their youthful goal. Still, Matt has a plan. Plans, even, as Matt has always had. All of which is to say you wouldn't have to be au fait with Nirvanna The Band The Series to grasp where Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is coming from. A mix of incredibly complex planning, apparent improvisation and genuine ingenuity, Johnson's film - an answer to the question "what if Jackass had been made by Canadian brainiacs rather than all-American jocks?" - will go on to encompass a death-defying skydive from a prominent Toronto landmark, a time machine fashioned from a rusty old RV, as well as the sight of Matt and Jay, shuffling now towards middle age and its attendant crises, encountering and interacting with their own younger selves. Some of this entails traditional forms of movie trickery, but much of it has been done for real; throughout NTBTSTM, the shooting permits typically issued by municipal authorities to filmmakers never quite seem big enough to cover the full scope of Matt Johnson's imagination. Which may explain why so much of the film looks to have been shot undercover, or otherwise on the fly.
The wider the film roams, the higher it climbs, the richer this decidedly sui generis item becomes: these 100 minutes are at once an expansion or remix of the original show, a lap of honour allowing the real Matt and Jay to realise at least one of their earlier dreams, a remake of Back To The Future with heroes who couldn't be any less like the aspirational Marty McFly, a magic trick of sorts (Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch's super-sharp cutting helps, but you'll also spend at least half the running time wondering how certain shots and effects were realised) and, in its own shambling, shrugging, insistently minor-key way, a demonstration of the cinema's infinite possibilities. NTBTSTM unfolds within a universe of wipeclean boards, where anything and everything could still happen; it involves the chicanery common to summer event movies - giving a sense that our protagonists are adrift in a world that is much bigger than it initially appears - but has none (or fewer) of the overheads and expenses. Somehow both artisanal and spectacular, the film keeps changing shape in surprising, confounding, funny ways. (One early sign Matt's thinking out of the box: the time travel movie he cites onscreen is that mad Ashton Kutcher thing The Butterfly Effect.) Best of all, Johnson makes this questing back-and-forth immense, infectious fun: watching NTBTSTM, you can physically feel the joy of someone making a film on their own terms, revisiting the buoying popular art of their youth, creating and tricking out a world of their own, and doing all of the above while hanging out and goofing off with old friends. (As in The Dirties and BlackBerry, the whole movie hinges on a bromance between two men who have nothing if they don't have each other: the middle stretch is The Butterfly Effect by way of Power Ballad.) The resulting experiment - the closest any film this summer has come to recapturing the puckish, playful, anything-goes spirit of the blockbusters of our childhood - confirms this filmmaker as a prodigious ideas man, perhaps a 21st century Preston Sturges, constitutionally unable to tell a story in the routine manner. In a healthier film ecosystem, our studio chiefs would be dangling the biggest cheques in the Western world before Matt Johnson's busy head - but maybe he's happy with playing the Rivoli.
Nirvanna The Band The Series The Movie is now showing in selected cinemas.
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