Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie

5/5

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie was barely on my radar. I knew it came from Matt Johnson, who directed the brilliant and criminally under-seen BlackBerry, and that it was a follow-up to the web series Nirvanna The Band The Show, which I had never seen and knew essentially nothing about. Then I started seeing wave after wave of ecstatic praise online. My interest was piqued. I am thrilled to report the film more than earns that praise.

NTBTSTM follows best friends Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, playing themselves, as they hatch yet another absurd plan to finally land a gig at the Rivoli. If that premise sounds simple, rest assured: the reality is far stupider, and far funnier, than whatever you are imagining.

The Rivoli is, on paper, a fairly unremarkable Italian restaurant in Toronto that sometimes books musicians. Matt and Jay have spent 17 years trying to play there. They have failed spectacularly. It does not take long to understand why. Matt is a chaos agent, forever dreaming up elaborate, deeply ill-advised schemes to get the venue’s attention; Jay, with the weary loyalty of a man who has suffered enough, keeps going along with it. But after nearly two decades of disappointment, it begins to feel like Jay may finally be ready to let the dream die.

What follows is some of the most deliriously inventive filmmaking I have ever seen, and I will not dare spoil any of it. Do not watch the trailer. Do not read another synopsis. Go in as blind as possible. The less you know, the better. Few films this year will reward that leap of faith as richly as this one.

What Johnson and company pull off here is astounding. On a technical level, I genuinely cannot wrap my head around how much of this movie was accomplished, especially on what was clearly a shoestring budget. The gags are not just funny; they are feats. Again and again, the film left me wondering not only how did they think of this? but how on earth did they actually pull it off? There is a stunt early on that is so outrageous, so brazen, that I am still completely baffled by its execution.

The film’s faux-documentary style is essential to why it works so well. For all the cinematic sleight of hand involved, everything feels startlingly immediate and real. The movie has a lived-in, off-the-cuff texture that makes its wildest swings land even harder. There is a sequence in the first half, which I later learned was filmed without permission, that captures the genuine reactions of unsuspecting bystanders as Matt and Jay carry out the first of many insane ideas. That kind of commitment gives the film an electricity that cannot be faked.

And yet the real triumph of NTBTSTM is that it is operating on far deeper levels than its setup initially suggests. Yes, on the surface, this is a movie about two idiots trying to book a show at the Rivoli. But it is also a film about friendship: about the way the traits that first endear us to people can, over time, become the very things that exhaust us; about resentment, co-dependence, forgiveness, and the stories we tell ourselves to avoid looking too closely inward. It sneaks up on you emotionally because it understands something essential and painful about long-term relationships of every kind.

It is also, to be clear, hysterically funny. My husband and I have been quoting it back and forth nonstop since we saw it. There is a fourth-wall break that absolutely flattened me, and one gag set in a movie theater that I have not stopped thinking about. The film understands that comedy is rhythm, escalation, and precision, and it is paced with extraordinary confidence.

But reducing NTBTSTM to “a great comedy” does it a disservice. By the end, I was in tears. Not because the film abruptly changes modes or strains for sentiment, but because it earns its emotion with such disarming grace. What begins as a ridiculous mission gradually reveals itself to be about much larger questions: how we choose to spend our lives, who we choose to spend them with, and how easy it is to lose sight of what really matters while chasing after something else. By the time it reaches its final movements, NTBTSTM becomes something unexpectedly profound: a deeply moving story about two very different people coming to understand just how rare and how meaningful it is to have found one another at all.