‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’, or How I Drove My Family Crazy [Review]

Matt Johnson’s ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’ is a feat of filmmaking and a testament to friendship at its most obnoxious.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026), Neon

The first time I saw Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, I was by myself. I was in a theater full of people also enjoying it, of course, as someone who puts great value on the theatrical experience, but I didn’t have anyone to stand awkwardly outside and talk about it with when it was over.

You know how it is when you go to the movies with a friend: you get to debrief after, gossip about the moments that worked and the ones that didn’t, or share any tidbit of random trivia you might know about it to prove that you are a Movie Watcher (capital M, capital W) instead of just a guy who watches movies.

I’m self-aware enough to acknowledge that, in the weeks after seeing the film, I may have become a bit annoying. People often refer to members of AMC’s A-List — a subscription plan where you can watch four movies a week at the theater for a monthly fee — as a cult, and I sort of became like that for this movie. I ditched my “can you believe it, there’s no up-charge for premium screens” for “can you believe it, they shot it all in public; these were people’s genuine reactions!”

As with my A-List propaganda, I got diminishing returns. Mostly, it was confusion about the title (“you know, I recently read this article about Kurt Cobain — ”) or outright rejections that amounted to how about we just get dinner instead?

At this point, I realized that I understood something about Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie that few others around me did, and it was something that I struggled to articulate: it absolutely rules.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026), Neon

It’s bad form to start a review with two anecdotes, but it’s also bad form to give a movie a title with such horrible SEO, so hear me out: when I was little, I used to make fake music videos with my best friend. We must have done it for years. We weren’t filmmakers, not really, but we were able to learn and discover things and grow together. Nowadays, she’s moved away to make movies, and I sit here and write about them.

There’s something both bittersweet and comforting about that, like there’s still an invisible string tying us together, back to our iPhone cameras and zero-budget attempts at creating something real and tangible. It is that exact nostalgia — friendship tied up in a dream — that drives Nirvanna.

In the film, Matt and Jay, two musicians who bear no intentional resemblance to any other band, alive or dead, are essentially older versions of that dynamic, which is to say they have all the dreams without the practical progress to show for it.

They have spent the better part of two decades trying to play a show at local Toronto venue, the Rivoli. Whether they have any music to perform as a band remains to be seen. Every day of their lives seems to go exactly the same: Matt bounds down the stairs and proposes some brand new, absurd idea to trick the Rivoli into letting them play, and Jay plays coy for a few minutes before inevitably succumbing to the same unbridled, ridiculous optimism.

When Matt’s already more-than-unsafe plan, aptly titled the “Seventh Inning Skydive,” goes wrong, Jay’s had enough. By mere coincidence, which bears only fair-use resemblance to Back to the Future, the two end up going back in time, putting both their band and their friendship in jeopardy.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026), Neon

Nirvanna is a sequel to — you guessed it — Nirvanna the Band the Show, a webseries and Viceland show, but you don’t need to know anything about any of that to have a good time. I certainly didn’t. What is important to know is that the movie was made by a small crew of only around four to eight people, shooting guerrilla style and taking advantage of any opportunities that popped up around them. There’s a shooting outside of Drake’s house? Great, let’s claim to be an independent press and get in on the scene.

The crew on Nirvanna has been working together for years, and Johnson has discussed how that was paramount to the creation of the film; by creating a space with people you not only feel safe with but genuinely want to be around, solving whatever insane issues pop up on the ever-evolving shoot somehow feels easier.

Looking at Nirvanna from the outside, it’s an absurd technical achievement. It has twenty years’ worth of footage edited so seamlessly together that you’ll wonder how Matt Johnson had better de-aging tech than big studio-backed projects like The Flash despite having only 1% of the budget. That’s not to mention all the pop culture references that should’ve been shot dead on the spot for copyright infringement (“if you’re watching this in theaters,” Matt says, “thank your lucky stars”). Even the line-toeing between movie moments and reality is done so well you barely notice when they cross it.

Beyond all that how did they do that, though, is a group of people who have worked closely together for years, who view some of the answers to those seemingly unanswerable questions as gospel for the series rather than some impossible feat. They can experiment together, mess up together and turn it into success together.

In an interview with patrick 2masso on YouTube, cinematographer Jared Raab discussed how even some things Matt and Jay did by accident ended up contributing to their distinct style. Not changing their color temperature while shooting inside in daytime, for example, made all of the scenes in their apartment warm-toned, incidentally creating a world where the inside of their apartment — at home, together — is a safe haven where the characters can feel totally comfortable and themselves, and the outside world is cool and unforgiving, where all their dreams and plans go to inevitably fail. Something that another filmmaker might have viewed as a mistake only built meaning: a visual cue that captures the feeling of being loved.

“I think almost every aesthetic choice we’ve made has been like that, where we’ve sort of fallen backwards into it and then fallen in love with it to the point where we can’t ever stop doing it,” Raab said (after which Johnson added on: “to our own detriment”).

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2026), Neon

At one point in the film, when talking to a younger version of Jay, Matt says, “The truth is, if you’ve got a best friend, you won’t even notice getting older.” When reflecting on the movie as a director rather than the fictionalized version of himself, Johnson later called that “the hackiest shtick I’ve ever said in my life”, but it really rings true.

The film does an interesting thing with its flashbacks, where the scene is altered to better fit the way the character remembers it; a character with hurt feelings, for instance, might remember the insults thrown their way to be much harsher than they were in reality. Toward the beginning of the story, Jay, soaked from the rain and irritated about a plan gone wrong, scowls when Matt shoots him with a toy gun. However, when he reflects back on that moment later, missing his friend, the flashback shows him smiling instead.

When you’re home with your friend, making music (or making music videos!) or seeing movies or whatever else — those are the moments Nirvanna holds dear, even if your friend is suggesting you jump off of the CN tower together, or even if your friend is the reason that everything is going wrong. Especially then.

As Johnson said in an interview with NPR: “There’s a beautiful idea in friendship and in family, which is that you really cannot escape who you are…A real friendship will always see past that.”

I realize that now I’m the one making the movie sound corny by waxing poetic about it, but in reality, I spent half the runtime cry-laughing. The toy gun bit in particular has probably the best payoff of a joke that I’ve seen in a long time. Matt’s whole-hearted and earnest commitment to his own absurdity makes every moment as rewarding as it is entertaining, and watching Jay play at judgment when he’s just as ridiculous and selfish himself adds a layer of irony that feels warm rather than cynical and detached.

At the end of the day, my brother agreed to go see the movie with me. It’s very hard to convince him to see anything that isn’t animated, so as soon as he said he would go, I instantly got nervous; this was my one shot to prove to him that other movies can entertain, too. But when I met up with him, I forgot why I was worried at all. Out of all the people I asked, he was the one who chose to come and spend the time with me, even if he had no idea whether he would enjoy the movie.

That meant a lot to me, both that moment of realization and the time we spent in the theater. That feeling — that gratitude, and that appreciation for the people in your life who you hold dear and who hold you dear right back, even when you’re getting on their nerves or don’t know when to shut up about a movie that you love — is what the film seeks to capture, and it does so exceptionally, like a bolt of lightning in a bottle.

You can see Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie in theaters, and it will be available to rent on VOD on March 24th.