In 1896, pioneering French filmmakers Auguste and Louis Lumière released The Arrival Of A Train At La Ciotat, a roughly 50-second clip of a steam engine pulling into a busy platform. The story goes that this cinematic feat was so novel that viewers initially leapt out of the way of the screen, terrified that they would be crushed under the great hulk of machinery.
This often-repeated tale is almost certainly an urban myth, though it does speak to the power of the Lumière brothers’ innovation. One hundred and thirty years on, viewers may have become more accustomed to the blurred lines between cinema and reality, but the medium still has the ability to perplex and bemuse. Just look at Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, the audacious new big-screen outing for Canadian duo Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s mockumentary web sitcom. Like the show, the movie combines improvised comedy with hidden camera footage involving unwitting members of the public.
With a bigger (though still modest) budget, the set-up now includes a string of dizzying stunts; all of this leaves you scratching your head as to what’s real and what isn’t. The uncertainty fuels the comedy, explains Johnson, the film’s director, who’s chatting to NME over video call alongside McCarrol: “It creates a kind of delirious feeling of, ‘I know this isn’t real – but I’m watching it. It is real.’ There’s something so pleasurable about having both of those things happen at the same time.”
The pair play outsized versions of themselves as hapless wannabe musicians who dream of one day showcasing their dubiously named act Nirvanna The Band at legendary Toronto venue, the Rivoli. Little has changed since Nirvanna The Band The Show launched in 2007, as each episode begins with ‘Matt’ devising a madcap scheme to try and pull off their goal. ‘Jay’ is a long-suffering stooge at his friend’s beck and call. Together, they follow in a grand tradition of co-dependent comedy characters, which runs all the way from Laurel And Hardy to the gang in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.
As Johnson puts it: “They can’t live without one another and yet really detest the way the other one is holding them back. That’s the perfect recipe.”
The movie sees Matt and Jay time-travel back to 2008 as part of a plot that’s brazenly cribbed from Back To The Future. At one point, they interact with their younger selves, which was achieved through the fiendishly clever splicing of old and new footage. In a hidden camera skit, they visit a hardware store, where an employee tries to gently dissuade them from buying pliers to cut through safety harnesses and parachute from the top of Toronto’s 1,815-foot CN Tower.
McCarrol notes that they approach these ruses gently, with the weirdness gradually escalating: “It’s like, ‘Hey, we’re just looking for some pliers – would these cut through…?’ We’re enunciating well and there’s no issue yet. But as soon as they go a little bit deeper with us, then they’re hooked.”
Like countless others, that scene works brilliantly because the man is so sweet and concerned, which Johnson believes sums up the temperament of Toronto residents: “Nobody wants to be bothered; nobody wants to get in anybody else’s way. They just want to get about their day, but they’re also extremely polite – which is a perfect recipe for Jay and I to go up to people with our problems and say, ‘We need your help.’ You instantly have this tension of: ‘I don’t wanna stay here and talk with you, but I do wanna help you because I’m nice…’”
Johnson and McCarrol, who are now both in their early 40s, have been pulling off these kinds of stunts since they met as teenagers in Mississauga, Ontario. They bonded over a shared love of ‘80s and ‘90s pop culture and started riffing through their own skits almost from the get-go. “We’d be in McDonald’s and pretend that we didn’t know each other,” McCarrol recalls. “We would have a dialogue that would have people around us raising their eyebrows, like, ‘What is happening here?’ We were both a little bit bold that way and got excited about mixing reality and comedy.”
Like their real-life counterparts, the onscreen Matt and Jay are music, film and TV obsessives, with the ultimate joke being that they’ve unwittingly named their act after the most famous band of their generation, which they’ve somehow never heard of. Have Johnson and McCarrol ever received word from the Nirvana estate over their misspelled use of the name? “It’s been 20 years and we have literally never heard anything,” says Johnson. “I think that’s probably for the best for their own sense of self-preservation. I imagine that Dave Grohl is like, ‘I’d better just not say anything because there’s no winning.’ I bet you he’d love the show.”
The duo often flirt with copyright issues on Nirvanna The Band The Show – the fact that the new movie is adapted from the actual script of Back To The Future should be enough to give a showbiz lawyer the horn. Yet they work carefully with their own legal maestro to ensure that their references are defensible under fair use law. Instead of seeking permissions, Johnson writes pre-emptive essays explaining why each piece of copyrighted material they plunder is essential to the plot.
This adds a frisson of punk energy to their endeavours, making it even more delicious that they’re now becoming mainstream public figures. Johnson directed and co-wrote the well-received 2023 tech biopic BlackBerry, for which McCarrol composed the music. They’re repeating this formula with the upcoming Tony, a coming-of-age tale about the early years of Anthony Bourdain. (Johnson had little knowledge of the rockstar food documentarian before taking on the project, a particularly punk detail that Bourdain himself would surely have enjoyed.)
From 2017, two series of the show aired on the short-lived VICE TV channel Viceland, though a third was canned when the Canadian network abruptly shut down in 2018. Johnson and McCarrol are planning a new series on traditional TV, using movie outtakes and unseen material from that abandoned season, with a DVD also set for release this summer.
In its core DNA, though, Nirvanna The Band The Show is an online, DIY affair – and Johnson and McCarrol aren’t the only self-published internet filmmakers who’ve made the leap to the big screen lately. Just look at young YouTubers Kane Parsons and Curry Barker, who’ve hit big at the box office with Backrooms and Obsession respectively.
“One thing that filmmaking on the internet does,” says Johnson, “is that you make skit after skit after skit and you wind up training yourself, almost like a musician doing multiple rehearsals of the same song. All of these online guys, you go back and watch their early stuff and it’s like, ‘This is awful and this guy’s going nowhere.’ Then you do it a thousand times and it’s like, ‘Oh my God! I always knew he was gonna be great!’”
If there’s a lesson in this current cinematic movement, he says, it’s “practice – do not expect to be amazing the first time, which is what gives people paralysis towards making anything at all”. Take it from a modern master of surprise, whose latest confounding creation is hurtling down the track.
‘Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie’ is in UK cinemas from July 3, with previews in selected locations from July 1