Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

The question rattling around in my head as I stumbled out of the theater Thursday evening and into the night was..."How?!"

Admittedly, I know the answer, at least in the abstract. The movie is wonderfully shot, but has an unprofessional look that can only come from a skilled tradesperson plying their craft. It's shot on handheld digital, shaky as hell and often adjusting focus, with a healthy dose of whip pans and crash zooms; it should not come as a shock that the original web series (Nirvana the Band [the Show]) was released in the late aughts, at a time when The Office and Punk'd were dominant cultural forces, and Parks & Rec was right around the corner. That mockumentary, fly-on-the-wall conceit, in which a tiny crew follows around these random guys for an eventual BTS ("Why?" is never explained, nor is it the least bit important) also means the camera is not always right on top of the action. Some of the biggest, most impressive events are caught from afar, or even just through a window. All of which gives them some more room to breathe with the movie magic, sure. But that a $2 million movie can swing for the fences this hard while remaining one-hundred percent convincing is nothing short of astounding.

That's not to say that there's a ton of trickery at play here. Director Matt Johnson (who co-wrote and co-stars in the film with Jay McCarrol) insists that the vast majority of what we're seeing on the screen is real. Sure, you can bet there's a heavy dose of clever editing and the Kuleshov effect and compositing. Hell, there's an extended sequence when Matt and Jay interact with their 2008 selves, apparently constructed by rummaging through the hundreds of hours shot for the show, and building scenes around their findings. But so much of this movie is out and about in Toronto, talking to regular people. Their most preposterous stunts are all in public, often in plain view of onlookers who will comment or react, or even be involved by the filmmakers. Shooting the film over more than two hundred days means they had time to patiently wait for reality to play into their hands, especially when recreating the city of twenty years ago. The obligatory scene of security personnel with blurred out faces is maybe the most stunning, as they allow Matt and Jay to the top of the CN Tower with backpacks and a pair of wire cutters suitable for cutting through thick cable, such as that of a safety harness.

This may all seem impenetrable if you're unfamiliar with the earlier show, but all it really requires is that you quickly dial in to their style of absurdist, over-the-top, energetic humor. The plot is simple: the fictionalized Matt and Jay have a band, and their decades long quest has been to play at legendary Toronto club The Rivoli. Well, Jay seems into it, but less like his life depends on it; Matt is constantly bounding into their shared living room and coming up with bizarre, silly, reckless stunts designed to be such big spectacles that the venue would have to book them. After the failure of the CN Tower plan, as the strain on their friendship threatens to end their collaboration, their separate desperations converge to send them back to 2008, back to the beginning, and on the hunt for a case of Orbitz soda. Wacky as this all seems, trust me, it all makes sense.

As someone who was coming of age in 2008 (albeit around 500 miles east and across an international border), its realization is both pitch perfect and hilariously biting. There's a layered joke involving The Hangover which is amongst the hardest I've laughed in a theater in years, as much from memory and cringing at who I (and we) used to be as from Matt's cartoonishly exaggerated facial expressions. Fashion changes subtly but noticeable, and the allusions to the pop culture of the time are both myriad and natural. The look is assisted by switching to an older model of digital camera, ostensibly to avoid freaking out the inhabitants with their crazy future tech; we know it's to ease matching the old footage, but just the same, the result is making the 2008 of the not-so-distant past as tactile as can be.

The speed at which this thing moves makes it difficult to talk about the plot without devolving into just walking through scenes. It's not convoluted in the least (okay, maybe a little bit), but so, so much happens, and all of it follows from half a dozen of the things that came before. It's a tightly wound Rube Goldberg machine of a plot, and it barely stops for an instant to take stock of what came before.

Except...that's also its emotional core. The real McCarrol is a talented musician, who's won a few Canadian Screen Awards and scored all of Johnson's movies (amongst others). The fictional Jay secretly wonders if his lifelong collaboration with Matt is holding him back from his dream of becoming a megastar. A small change in 2008 gives him a glimpse of what that might be like ("just like that Ashton Kutcher movie!"), and brings into focus that it's a film about what the passage of time does to us. It's about how many of us don't leave behind our dreams so much as we find our real lives that much more fulfilling, and watch our desires morph accordingly. About how time spent screwing around with a friend is time well spent, and how success achieved alone can be even more isolating.

None of this is revelatory, nor does the movie pretend it is by belaboring the point; rather, it provides texture for the characters, reminding you that for all its off-the-wall antics, what makes it tick is that these guys are real people. Exaggerated versions, sure, especially in the case of Matt, and living in a world of fantasy, yes. But at the end of the day, they are real people whom we want to succeed, even if all that means is never letting go of the joyous energy with which they pursue playing their cheesy, funny, yet heartfelt piano tunes in front of an audience.

Oh, did I not mention their music features frequently throughout, a Canadian Flight of the Concords, and is always good for a laugh?