Saw Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
Before seeing this movie based on a 2007 mockumentary webseries, I'd only seen their most internet-famous clip: the Wii Shop music sketch. Here it is:
Despite not seeing the webseries (Nirvana the Band the Show), or the TV show (Nirvanna the Band the Show), I was completely engrossed by the movie. It's definitely something you can see without any real familiarity. I saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse, which ran a pre-show video explaining the only thing you need to know about the two main characters: that they have a dream to play a show at The Rivoli, a club in downtown Toronto. Unfortunately, they have never recorded a song, nor even managed to contact the guy who manages the Rivoli's bookings. Basically, all you need to know is that the main characters have been incompetently scheming to get booked at the Rivoli for seventeen years, non-stop.
The movie opens directly into this premise. The two leads play a completely innocent pair of awkward, nostalgic manchildren trapped in the dream of their youth, but the story also treats them completely sincerely. The stakes are entirely focused on their friendship. It's appropriate, because the two creator/leads, Jay McCarrol and Matt Johnson, have also been playing these characters off and on for seventeen years, and were real-life childhood best friends before making the web series.
The story doesn't have anything particularly new to say about long-term friendships, but in execution it feels completely fresh and weird. It's an absurdist, insanely dense, joke-a-second comedy seamlessly composed of mixed scripted and unscripted scenes, including a variety of sequences that were filmed in public or in dangerous locations without permits. This included, apparently, a scene where Matt Johnson jumps off the roof of a bus, which they filmed during a Taylor Swift concert so that the overwhelmed Toronto police would be less likely to stop them. There is also material in the movie collected from a serendipitous attempt to film outside Drake's house during the police response to an actual shooting in his neighborhood back in 2024.
Despite all this, it ended up being one of the most adept movies I've seen about friendship, nostalgia, and aging in a long while. To me, this clash of the absurd and sincere is still the most aspirational kind of art anyone can be making. (If you've played Skin Deep, you can probably guess that we were deliberately aiming for that contrast of tones ourselves.) And it feels great to see such a long-running comedy duo pull off something so self-aware! Anyone who can keep their juice that long is an inspiration.
I am not sure that I am going to go back and actually watch the webseries now - that Wii Shop sketch might be all I need - but I was so glad to have seen this. If you were holding back on watching it because you're not familiar with the original material, I'd say just go for it. It's great.
Afterwards, read the making-of information on wikipedia. I desperately want to watch a documentary about how this movie was made!!!