Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol on Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

In the mid 2000s, nobody had seen any proof that internet virality could make you rich and famous, yet there was a thriving online ecosystem of no-budget skit comedy and reaction videos, uploaded purely for the love of the game. “It was the wild west,” says Matt Johnson. Inspired by pioneers like Pure Pwnage and Mega 64, Johnson and his childhood best friend Jay McCarrol started uploading Nirvanna the Band the Show in 2007. “We were just throwing ourselves in front of the camera,” recalls McCarrol, the pair treating the project as an extension of their film school studies and an attempt to make their friends laugh, in a way that Johnson describes as “audience agnostic.”

Their web series (and a TV adaptation commissioned ten years later) followed Matt and Jay, lightly fictionalised versions of Johnson and McCarrol, who are chronically stoned and constantly concocting hare-brained schemes to trick local Toronto bar The Rivoli into booking their band. Their obsession with the 80s and 90s media of their childhood informs their ill-conceived heists. It also gives each episode a familiar plot to parody; over the years, the duo have taken on Star Wars, Jumanji, Indiana Jones, Mrs Doubtfire and more.

Matt and Jay never got a show at the Rivoli, but in real life, Johnson premiered his found-footage thriller Operation Avalanche at Sundance in 2016, going on to direct more conventional, non-improvised comedies like BlackBerry, with McCarrol as co-writer and composer. “It was the perfect training ground for how to tell long-form, 90-minute movies because they all abide by the same rules,” Johnson says of Nirvanna the Band the Show, “the way that all stories are constructed.”

Now the pair are bringing their couch potato personas to the big screen in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Two decades on, Matt is still dragging Jay into doomed plans to secure a gig, which have escalated to the point of parachuting from Toronto’s CN Tower into a sports stadium. A botched attempt to recreate the DeLorean from Back to the Future warps the boys back to 2008, where the billboards advertise Grand Theft Auto IV, not VI, and Matt only notices things are amiss when a packed cinema cracks up at Bradley Cooper’s use of the f-slur in The Hangover.

Reckoning with the imperfections of the recent past is an apt direction for two film bros already stuck down memory lane. In real life, their work has put more distance between them and the classics they reference. “Making movies has completely dispelled a lot of the magic,” says McCarrol. “You study it like it’s a textbook of filmmaking. Does that diminish your nostalgia? I dunno. If I didn’t know anything about filmmaking, would the nostalgia be more potent?”

“I’m lucky in that I still don’t know anything about filmmaking,” Johnson jokes. “When you watch a great movie, the magic takes over and you cannot see the scenes.” Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie must be a great movie; trying to pick apart its fiction from reality is an uphill battle. Cinematographer Jared Raab has been shooting in this hidden camera format since the web series, capturing reactions from the unsuspecting public. Perhaps Matt and Jay didn’t really cut through safety harnesses to leap off the CN Tower – but they really did convince a security checkpoint to let them through with the pliers. “We believe the ends justify the means,” says Johnson.

“Sometimes!” McCarrol adds.

This prank show style harkens back to Jackass and Borat, though a crucial difference has set Nirvanna the Band... apart since the beginning. “We’re never trying to embarrass somebody,” Johnson explains. Their characters are screwballs, but earnest, often winning the assistance of passers-by.

“We are really, sincerely, in the moment with them.” McCarrol agrees, “even though we’re making a comedy, we’re not trying to be funny.”

A little public disorder isn’t the only line they toe. With all the references to popular culture, even cutting in frames from Back to the Future to steal Doc Brown’s special effects, the pair consistently stretch fair use laws. “Our intention is to make the world a better place, to give people the confidence to go out and take risks,” Johnson says.

Nirvanna the Band the Movie brings the foundational principles of the early internet – the recontextualising of media, the right to react, the wild westness of it all – into cinemas. Most of today’s internet sits on a handful of billion-dollar platforms, curated by algorithms and loaded with ads, self-censored by the copyright-conscious to avoid demonetisation. This sci-fi romp of mid-00s nostalgia merges film with video from a historical, more radical cyberspace.

Nostalgia can be a bias that blinds us, but also a force for social good; something that feeds our creativity and friendship. Archival footage brings together the modern Matt Johnson with his best friend from two decades ago, and you can almost feel the real-life relationship bleeding through, in the line “if you’ve got a best friend, you won’t even notice getting older.”

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Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is released 3 Jul by Vertigo Releasing
GFT hosts a preview of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie on 1 Jul in celebration of Canada Day