If there is ever a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for fictional bands, the likes of Spın̈al Tap and the Rutles will be guaranteed a place. Less certain is the fate of the duo created by Toronto college friends Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol in Nirvana the Band the Show, a 2007-08 mockumentary web series that was later picked up for two seasons by Vice TV. Johnson and McCarrol play incorrigible no-hopers Nirvana the Band, nothing whatsoever to do with Kurt Cobain’s grunge pioneers, who pin everything on securing a gig at Toronto’s Rivoli club. Undaunted by a total lack of songs, they pull off one cockamamie stunt after another, many filmed among unwitting members of the public, to promote their as-yet-nonexistent show.
From smashing a display case in the Royal Ontario Museum and being pursued by security guards to jumping on to the tracks of the Toronto subway, they are willing to do anything – except simply ask the venue for a gig. Then again, common sense isn’t their strong suit. Receiving a cease-and-desist letter pertaining to their name, they are incredulous: “There’s already a band called the Band?”
“We were so proud of that joke,” says Johnson now. On this sticky morning in Toronto, he is wearing a red sweatband over his shaggy hair and flapping his T-shirt to keep cool. He and McCarrol are in a friend’s apartment, talking to me over video call about the new big-screen spin-off, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. (They added that extra “n” on their lawyer’s recommendation during the Vice TV years.) This ingenious cinematic high-wire act, directed by Johnson, combines the life-endangering stunts of Jackass, the hidden-camera comedy of Borat and the plot of Back to the Future. Installing a flux capacitor in their RV, the duo zip from 2025 to 2008 in a bid to bag that Rivoli slot and change history.
Borrowing another film’s plot, says Johnson, is “kind of a writing hack. It ups the stakes, which are otherwise nonexistent: if these guys don’t play at the Rivoli, who gives a fuck? But because we absorb the built-in stakes of Back to the Future, for some reason you’re like: ‘Of course this is important!’”
A faint Boyhood effect is achieved, too, via dexterous editing that splices the pair as they are now in their early 40s into footage from 18 years ago. Travelling back in time, they spy on themselves as young whippersnappers but accidentally create an alternate universe where McCarrol is now a solo star playing to thousands of adoring fans.
On screen and off, the pair, with their mirror-image initials (MJ and JM), are temperamentally dissimilar yet on the same wavelength. The emphatic, excitable Johnson, whose other directing credits include Blackberry and the forthcoming Anthony Bourdain biopic Tony starring Dominic Sessa and Leo Woodall, talks in mile-a-minute monologues. McCarrol, formerly one half of the brother-sister synth duo Brave Shores, whose song Never Come Down was hijacked by Maga supporters and turned into a 10-hour video loop starring a dancing Donald Trump, is the more reserved and poker-faced of the pair: the Seinfeld to Johnson’s Kramer, the ellipsis to his exclamation mark.
Both men knew that Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie had to appeal far beyond devotees of the series. “Jay and I have a somewhat controversial belief,” says Johnson, “which is that people who have never seen anything from us before will enjoy the movie more. The less context you go in with, the more of a ‘What the fuck?’ experience you have.”
Several sequences are made to be watched slack-jawed through splayed fingers, not least the moment early in the film when Johnson and McCarrol charm their way through security at Toronto’s CN Tower with the intention of skydiving from the EdgeWalk platform 356 metres (1,168ft) up. The disparity between their goal (playing a neighbourhood music venue with a capacity of just 240) and the extreme lengths to which they will go to achieve it (time travel, illegal skydiving) creates a kind of comedy of disproportion.
Credit – or blame – for that CN Tower escapade goes to McCarrol. “I knew we needed scope, otherwise the movie would feel like a long television show. I said, ‘We’ve got to jump off the CN Tower or something.’”
I assume they must have been giggly with glee as they got closer to the top of the tower, but McCarrol disabuses me of that notion. “The whole thing had to be so meticulously planned that there really wasn’t ever any celebration. We had so many targets to hit. What’s in your head as you pass each one is: ‘OK, that’s 17 out of 50 targets hit … That’s 18 out of 50 targets hit …’ And then we’re in an Uber afterwards, leaving the scene of the crime, saying, ‘Oh, that was bad.’”
Making the movie, he says, “really wasn’t fun. It was 90% stressful.” The only time he and Johnson permitted themselves a sigh of relief was when they saw the rough-cut of a sequence filmed at a live crime scene. Hearing on the evening news in May 2024 that a security guard had been shot outside the singer Drake’s mansion in Toronto, the pair and their skeleton crew dashed over there and gathered footage that was then incorporated as the backdrop to a fictional crime in the film. “I don’t think we had a high that was higher than that,” says Johnson, still amazed at what they got away with.
Talking of getting away with things, longtime fans will spot that the humour in the movie is of a kinder hue than the web series. There are no homophobic insults, except in a clip from The Hangover that is used to illustrate how times have changed. Also gone is the original series’ fixation with racist humour: its use of the N-word and P-word, its dubious impressions. (As late as 2017, the pair were to be found singing Cornershop’s Brimful of Asha in “comedy” Indian accents.)
The change, McCarrol insists, is down to “the goalposts of life moving. You could argue that if the web series came out now, it would be tasteless.” At the same time, he says, “We were not going as far as Family Guy or South Park.” Johnson blames early 21st-century pop culture: “That was the water we were swimming in.”
He describes the characters as “like 10-year-old boys at summer camp. They are determined to discover the edge of whatever community they’re in. We always wanted to know, ‘How important are these rules? If we break them, do we die?’”
McCarrol says their comedy relies on “the well-trodden trope of how much fun it is when naive or ignorant characters are …” Johnson finishes the thought: “Trespassing on taboos. Our characters like to be naughty. I’m sure if I watched the web series now, I’d think: ‘I can’t believe we did that!’ But I would never condemn my past self because I’m still animated by that same feeling: ‘Show me the edge. What can I do that is gonna make my parents tell me I’m not allowed to do that?’”
It’s revealing that Johnson evokes the idea of parental disapproval. The Toronto publication Now did just that in 2017, likening the show to “watching two very comfortable white teenagers hang out in the safety of their parents’ basement”.
After all, when Johnson and McCarrol use racist language, it isn’t their parents who get hurt. It is viewers such as the Letterboxd fan who applauded the early series but added that “the amount of racism does wear on you … for me as a non-white person it … makes me feel like I have to grin and bear it which is not a good feeling for a comedy to elicit”.
Johnson takes the point: “I understand what you’re saying: ‘Oh, it’s not your parents, it’s the public at large.’” But he insists the “framework” for their comedy, which hinges on pushing back at accepted norms, remains valid. “I’m still using it today. Jay and I have a line on set: ‘It’s difficult for us to be class clowns unless there’s a teacher.’”
They diverge starkly only once today, when reflecting on their youthful material. “We did get it wrong, admittedly,” concedes McCarrol. Johnson, though, is defiant: “Oh, I’m not willing to go that far,” he says. Perhaps the point is moot. For this movie, they have put their edgelord ways behind them and made an effervescent comedy that is risky without being racist.