Nirvanna the Band is not the band Nirvana.
Most people are probably familiar with the latter, the iconic rock group formed by Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic. They may have less awareness of the former, a fictional two-man band featuring comedians/filmmakers Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol that started as a parody web series in 2007.
“The word Nirvanna has been such a thorn in our sides this whole time,” McCarrol admitted in an interview with TheWrap, tongue firmly in cheek. “It’s why we have two ‘N’s, and even that isn’t getting us completely off the hook.”
They may not be Nirvana, but as the Canadian duo tours their new film, “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” in cities like Chicago, Portland and Nashville, Johnson feels like the front man of a rock group all the same.
“There’s something live about it where it seems out of control,” he said. “That’s something that I don’t think we predicted was going to be the experience as you watched it in the theater, because ‘Nirvanna the Band,’ up to this point, has been a television series. In some ways, it’s designed to be watched alone on a laptop where you can pause it whenever you want.”
Johnson and McCarrol are the latest to draft off of their online success to draw in audiences, and follow creator Markiplier, whose YouTube fame helped get his passion project in theaters earlier this month. But while “Iron Lung” is a more conventional horror film, “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” is an entirely different beast, drawing from the chaotic, messy roots of their web series to create a film that’s been a legal “copyright nightmare” thanks to the use of a bevy of pre-existing media in their film without asking for permission, citing fair use. It’s a gamble, but one in keeping with the spirit of the TV show on which the film is based.
“We don’t go through copyright holders and ask them, ‘Hey, can we please do this?’ which is the way that 99% of movies you’ve ever seen do it,” Johnson explained. “What we’re doing is different. We’re creating a legal argument for our creative fair use of each individual copyright infringement. I use that word infringement to clarify what people think we’re doing.”
For Johnson, making a “Nirvanna the Band the Show” movie also meant taking the rare turn back to his roots, rather than capitalizing on his last successful film, the well-reviewed gadget biopic “BlackBerry,” and pursuing a bigger, more commercially appealing project. The web series “Nirvanna the Band” eventually became a two-season TV show on Viceland in the 2010s (neither is currently legally available in the U.S., though that will soon change) and has a niche-but-dedicated fanbase.
The lifelong friends wrote and starred in the movie and the series together, playing fictionalized versions of themselves. Every episode of the show sees the doofus duo attempting to get their band, Nirvanna the Band, booked to play the Canadian venue The Rivoli. They never succeed.
“Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” marks the largest-scale version of a project Johnson and McCarrol have developed for nearly two decades. The film sees Matt and Jay traveling back in time to 2008 and interacting with versions of themselves from the beginning of their web series.
But no awareness of “Nirvanna the Band the Show” is needed to enjoy their big-screen adventure. The film brought new eyes to their old duo, opening in 365 theaters over Presidents’ Day weekend to nearly $1.5 million. Indie label Neon picked it up after it premiered at South by Southwest in March 2025.
Many would call this movie, to put it bluntly, a risk. “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” mixes a mockumentary style with a “Back to the Future” parody, using pop culture references, guerrilla filmmaking and extensive archive footage — involving Bill Cosby, a shooting at Drake’s mansion and jumping off the top of the CN Tower. Johnson owns up to the legal trickiness in the film itself, looking into camera to tell the audience they’re watching something so legally complicated that it may be pulled from theaters.
“Anybody can sue anybody for anything,” Johnson said. “So we’re trying to create the best possible legal conditions on our side to defend ourselves.”
“If and when that comes,” McCarrol interjected.
But while the scope may be bigger, the creators are still the same scrappy team they were in the mid-2000s, assembling their film through riffing, devised storytelling and legal ingenuity. Throughout the film, Johnson even wears the same pair of jeans he wore at the beginning of their web series — although they’re pretty much falling apart after almost 20 years.
“Those ripped jeans are a decent symbol of all of these decisions,” Johnson further stated. “We made them, we stuck with them and we refused to take them off, no matter how damaged and ridiculous they began to look to other people.”
“They’re showing Matt’s whole ankles,” McCarrol laughed.
“You’re watching the erosion of time on my pants,” Johnson added. “Nothing can stop it.”
From band to show to movie
After “BlackBerry,” Matt Johnson had a blank check.
Johnson, who directed the film about the titular mobile phone brand (McCarrol composed the score), remembers sitting for the premiere at 2023’s Berlin Film Festival. Sitting next to “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “BlackBerry” star Glenn Howerton, Johnson anxiously awaited an audience response — any response — to his biggest film yet.
That is, until the audience erupted in laughter to a line from Howerton.
“He reached over and just grabbed my thigh harder than I’ve ever been grabbed in my life,” Johnson said. “We were just holding each other for the next 10 minutes being like, ‘Oh my God, this worked. These people like it.’ That was kind of the jumping off moment of all of this stuff.”
After the screening concluded, Telefilm Canada (a government-run Crown corporation that supports Canadian filmmaking) approached Johnson with a simple question: What do you want to do next?
“I said, ‘If you let me just do whatever I want, I will make a Nirvanna the Band movie,’” Johnson recalled. “But you can’t ask any questions, and I need infinite time to do it.”
Everyone around him suggested that he use this opportunity to do something different, something bigger.
“Everyone except for me, of course, who’s telling Matt, ‘Matt, I think the best thing to do for your career is to make a Nirvanna the Band movie,” McCarrol laughed. “Lucky me!”
“It was a real Nirvanna the Band plan,” Johnson agreed. “You were basically adopting the Matt character in that moment. You were the devil on my shoulder.”
A movie marked the natural next step in the decades-long evolution of “Nirvanna the Band.” Johnson and McCarrol, who first became friends during high school in Mississauga, Ontario, long wanted to make something together, whether that be short films or something grander. In the meantime, they settled on making each other laugh with only their comic instinct and a piano.
“Not realizing we were creating characters, we’d be sort of shadow versions of ourselves, where Jay would play the piano and I would goof around trying to participate verbally,” Johnson said.
When the two moved in together post-university at Queen and Spadina in Toronto, they began using these Matt and Jay personas for a web series: “Nirvana the Band the Show” (which initially used the same name as the famous rock band). Their apartment became the setting for the show, which used a mockumentary lens to depict the fictional band hatching absurd plans to play The Rivoli, an iconic Toronto bar down the street.
“When you’re a kid, you think, ‘Oh my God, if I was an adult, I could walk right into the hospital and I could be a doctor,’” Johnson said. “You step into these roles as a kid, because you don’t understand what adults are. You only see them as archetypes. I think that’s what Matt and Jay do constantly: They step into the archetypes.”
Johnson likened their comic process to a recording of “October in the Railroad Earth” by Jack Kerouac, where the poet speaks through seven minutes of spontaneous prose while a jazzy piano player provides accompaniment.
“This is what Nirvanna the Band thinks they are,” Johnson explained. “For the longest time, it was the original opening credits song of the movie.”
Years after the web series’ 2007 to 2010 run, Johnson and McCarrol created a full television show titled “Nirvanna the Band the Show” (now with an additional n) on Viceland.
Then came the itch to make a film.
The pair worked through a few “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” ideas. They initially began filming the project as a loose adaptation of “A Confederacy of Dunces” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” making an RV road trip film that took them across America and, eventually, to New Orleans. It wasn’t until they got home and assessed footage from their editors that the filmmakers realized they were “not excited about this idea” in what McCarrol called a particularly “vulnerable moment.”
So Johnson and McCarrol took stock of what they did have: a new RV, an archive of unused web series material and as much ingenuity as their fictional band. Why not put the three together and make their big movie an extended “Back to the Future” riff?
“It all very quickly came together, all these pieces, and we got on a real roll writing it,” McCarrol said. “We were kind of just amending our story, but then we were like, ‘Why don’t we take this RV and turn it into our own sort of DeLorean?’”
‘A copyright nightmare’
In the third act of “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” Matt looks into the camera to say what everyone in the audience is thinking: this must be a copyright nightmare.
The movie is a patchwork of famous media, using pop culture references to tell a back-to-2008 time travel story. “Back to the Future” is evoked endlessly. Scenes from the “Hangover” are integral to the story (despite being released in 2009). Images of Bill Cosby and Jared Fogel let audiences know that they are indeed in the past. In one scene, a mega-famous McCarrol takes the place of Chris Rock in a digitally altered depiction of Will Smith’s Oscars slap.
But when asked what specific bit of intellectual property was the toughest to clear, Johnson’s answer was simple: “Nothing is cleared.”
Before filming anything, Johnson and McCarrol needed to ensure they wouldn’t hit any copyright snags. The director worked alongside his lawyer on a series of essays that justified each and every use of copywritten material long before the eventual shoots.
Johnson and McCarrol don’t script “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” the same way most filmmakers would. The duo worked with their editors to sequence a complete story down the line after filming largely improvised scenes shot on real locations. The footage informs the story as much as the story informs the footage, if not more.
“It happened exactly as it is, just once,” McCarrol said. “Nothing is ever scripted.”
Flexibility defines Johnson and McCarrol’s creative style. In 2024, the duo wrapped up a shoot when they overheard that there was a shooting outside Drake’s Toronto mansion. The pair then rushed to the scene of the crime, working out how they could fit it into their story on the way. When they arrived, they filmed Jay running away from the scene. In the final film, footage of the Toronto police speaking to the press plays as if it’s Jay who committed the crime.
But some sequences had to be planned in advance. One of the biggest set pieces sees Jay and Matt jump off of Toronto’s CN Tower, explaining to real security guards and hardware store employees why they need to bring a pair of sharp pliers with them to the top.
“What you’re seeing is literally what’s happening, apart from us at the very last second jumping off the tower,” Johnson said. “Everything else — us going through security, us putting on this clothing — you’re watching a hidden camera show.”
Nirvanna the Band couldn’t get every reference they wanted to include, however. McCarrol noted that, while direct scenes from “Back to the Future” appear in the film, the song “The Power of Love” by Huey Lewis & the News became, “for a number of reasons, un-gettable” for their opening credits sequence.
The references they did get away with, Johnson argued, are integral to the film and the story.
“We’re trying to make the creative case for why it’s so vital that these guys, these characters, interact with media in the way that they do,” he said. “They’re made by media. These influences, these references — that’s the language that they speak in.”
This parody extends to the marketing of the film itself. Back in January, fans were shocked by the similarity between a “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” poster and an Imax poster for “Marty Supreme” that released only three hours earlier. The “Nirvanna” poster asks audiences to “Dream bigger,” playing off of the “Marty Supreme” tagline, “Dream big.”
“It was as simple as getting accidentally CC’d on an A24 email and then doing everything we could to release our poster at the same time,” Johnson admitted. “We mixed up the EST/PST, so we were three hours later rather than being at the exact same time, but we were trying to do a Nirvanna the Band-style, like, ‘That’s impossible? How could anybody do that?’”
Nirvanna the Band the Show the future
As Johnson wandered around Larchmont Avenue, the actor/filmmaker told TheWrap that the week of his film’s release has been identical to the past several months of his life.
“This has been a nonstop press tour since October,” he said.
While “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” stands as a testament to Johnson and McCarrol’s lifelong friendship, it also comes with a bit of ennui. Jay’s disillusionment with their band’s endless antics drives the story of the film. While Johnson and McCarrol love their decades-long franchise, they both admitted to sharing those feelings.
“Jay is the protagonist of the movie because he represents the reality that is true, and it’s true for both of us,” Johnson said. “We’re not trying to make fun of Jay’s character and say, ‘Oh, doesn’t he have it so wrong? Doesn’t he realize that this life is amazing?’ Oftentimes, both feelings are true: You do want to just screw around and try to do the impossible thing all the time, while at the same time acknowledging, ‘You know, we kind of look pathetic, the fact that we’re still doing this.’”
“Right after ‘BlackBerry,’ everybody in the world was telling me, ‘Do not do this, because it is pathetic,’” he continued. “Reading between the lines, that really was the message.”
After “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” Johnson will return to the biopic world post-“BlackBerry” to direct “Tony,” a biographical drama starring Dominic Sessa as famed foodie Anthony Bourdain.
“I’m really lucky that I’m signed on to do the score for ‘Tony,’ so we’re going to be able to continue working together,” McCarrol assured.
But the band won’t stay away from the world of Nirvanna for long. Johnson and McCarrol both shared their intentions to make a third season of the show at some point in the future (that ennui didn’t last long). They also revealed that Neon intends to re-release the original run of the series — not currently available to view legally in the U.S.
“Neon is doing a full release on physical media and on streaming of our entire series where you’re going to be able to watch — maybe even in 4K — all the episodes with director’s commentary. We’re doing a full, gigantic physical release,” Johnson said. “I think that Season 3 is a priority, in as much as the movie was a priority, which is we know it’s going to be painful, but when we do it, it’ll be the best work we’ve ever done.”
