Take a leap

Hugely likable, idiosyncratically Canadian and laugh-out-loud funny, this madcap mockumentary follows two underemployed musician friends, Matt (Matt Johnson) and Jay (Jay McCarrol), as they travel back and forth through time, all in an attempt to book their band, called Nirvanna the Band, at the Rivoli, a storied Toronto club.

The comic anarchy starts with Matt, who likes to diagram out needlessly complicated plans on his handy whiteboard. He declares the best way to book a Rivoli show involves skydiving from the CN Tower into the Skydome. (Obviously, right?)

When that sweetly delusional plot — spoiler alert! — doesn’t work, Matt decides to double down on the lunatic ideas. Clearly, the only viable alternative is travelling back in time.

Ridiculously, brilliantly, this strategy succeeds. Inspired by Back to the Future — which they own on VHS — Matt rigs up a Rube Goldberg contraption inside their lumbering vintage RV.

After an accident involving Orbitz, a weird, short-lived Canadian beverage from the 1990s, the two rocket back to 2008.

Here they encounter late-oughts stuff such as independent downtown movie houses, prolific print media and a banner ad for CBC radio show Q hosted by Jian Ghomeshi. They also run into their younger, fresher selves. (This is achieved with some incredibly clever editing of Nirvanna footage recorded years before.)

Head-busting time-travel paradoxes ensue.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is based on a culty TV series that itself is based on a culty web series, but it can be enjoyed by Matt-and-Jay superfans and newbies alike.

Co-scripted by McCarrol, Johnson and close collaborator Jared Raab and directed by Johnson — the three also worked on BlackBerry — the Nirvanna experience is grounded in the chemistry of the two men. Because Johnson and McCarroll are old friends playing old friends, the film has a lived-in feel, almost as if the viewer is right there hanging out with them in their messy, memorabilia-filled house.

There’s also a nice comic balance, with Matt being more of a chaos Muppet and Jay being more of a straight man. Often what seem like throwaway bits are hilarious — like a whole thing about the past tense of the word “skydive” (“Skydove?” “Skydived?”) — because Johnson is one of those comedians who doesn’t have to do funny. He just is funny.

Since both Jay and Matt seem to understand and experience the world almost entirely through pop-culture references, the film is also super-meta, enormously nostalgic and packed with riffs on video games, music and, of course, time-travel movies from the silly (The Butterfly Effect) to the sublime (La Jetée).

The whole project is “a copyright nightmare,” Matt admits, in a bit of fourth wall-breaking. (The one phenom that seems a little hazy in Matt and Jay’s pop-culture universe is that Seattle grunge band with the slightly different spelling.)

Working within lo-fi, low-budget parameters, NTBTSTM is, in its own oddball way, ambitious and audacious. Viewers may find themselves wondering how the crew even got some of this footage, as the film’s handheld, guerilla-style shooting catches wild, semi-improvised stunts and random interactions, some with actors playing versions of themselves but some with regular real-life Torontonians.

The local T.O. content includes dizzying views from the top of the CN Tower, traffic problems at the corner of Queen and Spadina, and a bizarro sequence featuring rapper Drake’s baroque Bridle Path mansion.

The guys are adorably predictable in their single-minded quest to book the Rivoli — this has been going on since 2008, after all — but the movie keeps surprising us. As the time-travel plot hurtles toward its crazy conclusion, the shaggy story becomes a tight, precise loop-de-loop, while the goofy comedy reveals a rather poignant consideration of the meaning of friendship.

Satirical but affectionate, modest but weirdly magnificent, this is a very funny, very Canadian film.

winnipegfreepress.com/alisongillmor