Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (2025) & Permanent Childhood, Or I've Never Had Fun Even Once In My Whole Life

I don't really give spoiler warnings in my essays anymore but I thought I would with this one as I essentially give away the endings of two tangential movies to the one I'm discussing below. There are major spoilers for Rose of Nevada (2025) and Castration Movie Anthology II. The Best of Both Worlds (2025) below so please be warned !!!

oh yes / It sits upon the choicest of / Church seats / up there where art directors meet / to choose the things for immortality / And they have lain with beauty / all their lives / And they have fed on honeydew / and drunk the wines of Paradise / so that they know exactly how / a thing of beauty is a joy / forever and forever / and how it never never / quite can fade / into a money-losing nothingness

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

took us so long to separate / I feel / it's permanent like a riptide / this time / Waves crashing fast / I try / Think of the past / please stay

- SZA, 20 Something

I've recently found myself bristling at the amount of films about emasculated men being produced, especially during a time in which gender relations appear to be getting worse. I wanted to admire the quiet, haunted feeling Mark Jenkin's Rose of Nevada was attempting to produce when I watched it earlier this year. Unfortunately, to me, it felt like another retread of men reverting to the past as a way to escape a present that doesn't cater to them anymore. By the end of that film, the characters have basically accepted their regressed lives and are presumably able to assimilate in a way that no other group possibly could. In a sharp turn and potentially jarring comparison, Nick Love's Marching Powder, a fascinating but baffling film that came out last year, longs for a younger, more acceptably laddish present, and attempts to morph the world to fit its abrasive main character, someone who would slip easily into Love's earlier film of the same calibre, The Football Factory, but is struggling to accept a world that no longer centres and, more importantly, deifies his kind of masculinity. This shrugging of shoulders, this cold acceptance, this halting of all progression reads as a temper tantrum at best and deeply reactionary at worst, the past as a place one can hide from progressive politics, and duck out on the responsibility of being a better person.

If we compare these movies to something scrappier and thornier, like Louise Weard's Castration Movie Anthology II. The Best of Both Worlds, then it's clear to see that it is possible to detail the benefits of regression without necessarily arguing in favour of them. When the main character chooses to de-transition at the end, it's not because masculinity or presenting as a man is the most pleasurable choice. It just reads as the choice that will bring about the least amount of pain, in comparison to being a trans woman in Trump's America. Weard is careful to detail, agonisingly, how untenable trans life has become and how relenting to the pressure of those around you can seem like a choice worth making when every other one has been rendered too painful to endure.

In simple terms, Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (2025) is about negotiating the past and trying to avoid the pain of maturity, as two men attempt to find relevance artistically and repeatedly fail. Matt and Jay are two lifelong best friends who participate in various schemes, most of which are conceived by the former, often resulting in humiliation and always resulting in the failure to secure a show at the most revered venue they can think of: The Rivoli in Toronto. Jay has grown tired of their antics and seeks to attend an open mic in Ottawa, when he and Matt are shot back to 2008 and end up changing their future in ways that are unimaginable to them: Jay has become a successful musician and, worse still, is no longer friends with Matt.

Much of Matt Johnson's work exists in the push and pull of maturity, what is expected of the characters and what would be the most fun to do, what would create the greatest spectacle. I would argue that this film is in conversation with the Bildungsroman form, a story in which a young person undergoes a process of education in the ways of the world that they must establish their place in and that often focuses on the extent that the individual is 'a product and creature of society' and that said individual can be 'read as an allegory [for] society’s condition', as John R Maynard argues. Johnson, then, presents a world refusing to grow up and funnels all of this energy into these two characters. The film makes the claim that it is the ephemeral that is the most valuable, a sly wink to the audience that a character in a movie is a doll to be played with, not a real person who must grow and change. It exists between critique and celebration, both wincing at the mistakes cemented in 2008 and how they have shaped modern culture, and indulging unabashedly in remaking an entire sequence from Back To The Future (1985), more scrappy and tongue-in-cheek this time, but no less sincere. Nostalgia is not necessarily denigrated but rather acknowledged to be a part of the modern filmmaking process.

Blending genuine spectacle and the grimace that comes with the awkward tension of putting real life people in the middle of their misbehaviour, there is a clear legacy of cringe comedy and anti-comedy at the heart of Nirvanna The Band. Seeking to lampoon and potential satirise the form of traditional situational comedy, anti-comedy exists in the uncomfortably perverse and perversely uncomfortable. Its style often relies on tenacious performance art and a commitment to the bit, to the point where the lack of a laugh becomes a punch line on its own. This level of commitment to incompetence, to silence, can be interpreted as a mode of resistance against the professionalism expected from the performer in question, even in a comedic context. In reference to the kind of movie that blurs the lines between the real and the fictional, this kind of comedy seems indicative of the modern age in which anything anyone does has the potential to be filmed and displayed for public consumption. It's work that seems to belong in the gap between public access television and the internet, a blend of Tom Green's outrageous performance of narcissism and Adult Swim's lo-fi surrealist aesthetics, though with Nirvanna The Band, from the web series to the movie, there has been a grounding of the fantastical elements in a mockumentary style.

The documentary format asks the audience to suspend their disbelief that the images on screen are anything but a factual representation of reality. In contrast, the mockumentary 'appropriate[s] documentary aesthetics to create a fictional world' and is able to 'develop a relationship with a knowing audience' by mocking well-worn tropes, as is detailed in the book, Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking. The lived in, jaw-dropping spectacle of the blockbuster has long dissipated with the introduction of obvious technology that cleans up the edges and removes all danger from the antics within the frame. The mockumentary format, that places the characters in real life Toronto amongst people who are also watching these lunatics enact a wacky plan, exposes the tactility of the world as opposed to hiding it beneath all-too-clean surfaces.

The referentiality in the film can be read as a Canadian filmmaker playfully appropriating and repositioning key American film texts, and placing them in an alien context, that being literally above them. Remaking Back To The Future in Toronto highlights the way the American film industry has monopolised film culture generally, how there are certain films that work as genre signifiers and expressions of cultural clout. Where I believe the original film is one that perverts the parent-child relationship and positions Marty as key to masculinising his father as a way to save him from the masochistic suburban hell he currently lives in, Nirvanna The Band bends the time travel narrative away from the familial structure and towards a bond thicker than blood: friendship.

Most of Matt Johnson's filmography can be condensed into one sentence: I want my best friend to stay with me forever and I'm willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen. As a result, he will often write and perform characters who are actively resisting change and, therefore can never mature. In Nirvanna The Band, we see a willingness to sacrifice his own life in order to make his friend happy and successful, a selfless decision that he literally never has to face the reality of. Jay will always choose to stay with him because that's how the character is written.

This bond, more than the time travel in the film, offers a freedom from consequences. Where Matt shooting Jay with a toy gun is a silly goof, Jay shooting a real gun at one of his bandmates ends in disaster and death. Despite their often hazardous behaviour, neither of these characters has died or caused actual harm to the real world, safe within the fantasy of fiction. The form hinting at something close to real life acts in ironic contrast to the fantasy elements present. The safety of the film means they were never in danger. Only when they mess with their past does that danger seep in.

Friendship in the film exists converse to the responsibilities of adult life, positioned as a relationship one prioritises because of immaturity. It allows for fun and hijinks, and is in opposition to financial and social success, making it an excellent avenue for the comedy adventure flick, but a nightmare if you have actual ambition. It opens up this endless hole for the characters to fall into and never leave, because if they were to leave, the adventures would end and they would probably have to get 'real' jobs and stop being artists. Further, homosociality, and its association with queerness, becomes a marker of the abnormal, the static, the puerile. By centring friendship as the key to creativity, the film puts itself in conversation with a culture stuck in a loop, unable to grow up.

The film both revels in and indicts nostalgia, exploiting the audience's desire to return to a simpler time and immediately presenting the glum reality of it. There is an extended sequence in which Matt and Jay enter their old apartment in 2008 and find themselves stuck in their closet, listening to previous versions of themselves, farting around until the early hours of the morning. We understand from earlier in the film that not much of their life has materially changed, beyond where they live, and that going back to a time when they had their futures ahead of them did not inspire as much shock and awe as when Marty went back to the 1950s. The time here was precious, not because of what was ahead of them, but because they only thought about the present moment.

An young version of Jay briefly contemplates getting old, to which the present version of Matt argues that getting old wouldn't be so bad if he was with his friend when he did it. There is a negotiation between what it means to live meaningfully, whether we can love the cycle, or if we will, eventually, want to leap off and choose to do something different. The antics of these two friends allowed for a constant regeneration of creativity and energy. As is the main joke of the show and the film, they will never get to perform at the Rivoli, but they will get to play with each other forever. I'm just nervous about the world these two men have trapped us in.

Further Reading:

The Emasculated Men of 2025

The King Of Comedy (1982, directed by Martin Scorsese)

Freddy Got Fingered (2001, directed by Tom Green)

Open The Door (2007, directed by Lena Dunham)

The Comedy (2012, directed by Rick Alverson)

Operation Avalanche (2016, directed by Matt Johnson)

Matt and Mara (2024, directed by Kazik Radwanski)

Rap World (2024, directed by Danny Scharar and Conner O’Malley)

The Mastermind (2025, directed by Kelly Reichardt)

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

Philip Auslander, Comedy, Mediatization, Resistance: Andy Kaufman and Sandra Bernhard