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Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie review: Like Flight of the Conchords mixed with Back to the Future

This Canadian cult hit – which is a spin-off from a hit TV show – feels genuinely home-made.

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

Vertigo Releasing

Published: Thursday, 2 July 2026 at 12:09 pm

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A star rating of 3 out of 5.

The genesis of this Canadian buddy-buddy time-travel comedy is so complicated it might be simpler to spin back to when best pals Matt Johnson (director/co-writer/star) and Jay McCarrol (co-writer/composer/star) started out instead of trying to explain it.

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Styled as a mockumentary, back when such a thing was still novel, their 2007 web series Nirvana the Band the Show featured fictionalised versions of themselves trying to get their music heard, with limited success. It led to a 2017 TV series, Nirvanna the Band the Show, with the extra “n” added to avoid infringing the copyright of a certain grunge act.

Now, 9 years later, comes this film, which borrows elements from previous efforts. Imagine Flight of the Conchords mixed with a home-made Back to the Future, and you have some idea what to expect.

We first meet Matt and Jay in 2008 trying to get a gig at Toronto’s Rivoli club. Fast-forward to 2025, and they’re still at it, concocting a series of outlandish stunts to drum up interest. Needless to say, they fail, until the so-called “time travel plan” works – to an extent – landing them back in 2008.

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Here they interact with their past selves, and end up changing the future "like that Ashton Kutcher movie". They mean The Butterfly Effect rather than Dude, Where’s My Car?, although the mood cleaves slightly closer to the latter.

Throughout the jam-packed runtime, the film, like its stars, has an infectious energy, always coming up with outlandish new ideas in the face of near-disaster. In another guise, Matt’s constant reaching might be annoying, but there’s a – very Canadian – modesty to it that undercuts any sense of X-Factor-style please-pick-me self-promotion. Once the pair have been rescued by the fire brigade, they all shake hands. After they crash their tour bus into a newsstand, they stop to pick up the debris.

For all the look-at-me moments – particularly an early sequence atop a very famous Toronto landmark, which seems impossible on the budget – it’s the witty little asides that stay with you, from the pair pondering the past tense of skydive (skydove, skydiven?), to interrupting yet another plan with a 1980s hip-hop skit.

It also feels genuinely home-made, with bursts of guerrilla filming on the city streets and interactions with people who seem like real passers-by. If the plot leans rather too heavily on other pieces of pop culture, at least they know it. "This is gonna be a copyright nightmare!" admits Matt, straight to camera.

Full marks, too, go to McCarrol’s limber music, which moves from lovely piano motifs to spoof pop hits, with more than a few nods to Alan Silvestri’s stirring Back to the Future score along the way. A copyright nightmare indeed.

While it seems churlish to criticise something that has clearly been made with so much love, it does make you question who exactly it’s for. While long-term fans will be delighted to get an extra helping of zaniness from the band, newbies may be confused, put off, or just unwilling to take a punt on something with so much lore to uncover. "If you build it they will come," is the motto of the film – not to mention Field of Dreams – but is that really true?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps, as with the band’s continued "career", it’s more about building it than whether anyone comes. Johnson has compared making the film to a school reunion of sorts, and it’s because of the duo’s enduring friendship that it works so well. Ultimately you want them to succeed, even as you know they won’t.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is released in UK cinemas on Friday 3 July.

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Authors

Matt Glasby

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