The final act of Matt Johnson’s 2023 comedy Blackberry — one of the best films of its year, and this half decade — opens with a time jump to 2007. It’s abrupt. The film first opens in 1996, and spends time in 2003, before we reach the ignominious late-aughts death of the titular one-time cellular giant. The footnote phone the movie is about is hopelessly dated tech that is as much a symbol as it is a sight gag in a movie about the accidental billionaires who never were, the Canadian dipshit runners-up in the fight for control of the industry that will define the future.
There is a kind of humor a movie like Blackberry could fall victim to, That 70s Show wardrobe bits and Zoolander riffs on piano key neckties, but its 40-year-old director, Matt Johnson, knows how to employ the period-specific detail without leaning on it. The film is aware of how badly we dressed and oblivious we were — and neither skimps on nor heightens those lived-in touches — but the folly of Blackberry’s characters isn’t their bad taste: it’s their hubris, their Greek self-delusion, and their utter flailing as their destinies get away from them. We laugh at them, but we feel for them, because their shortcomings are both specific to their time and also timeless. That subtle distinction is the difference between a good director of comedy that captures a moment in culture, whose career as a future filmmaker will likely be confined to that moment (and we all have one-time comedic geniuses that come to mind), and an endlessly resourceful director with a long, exciting career ahead of them.
Matt Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is based on a web series that ran between 2007-2009 about two man-boys (Matt Johnson as Matt — often wearing a fedora that was dated even when the show premiered and explains the character to a T — and his childhood best friend and collaborator, the artist Jay McCarroll, as Jay, the exasperated straight man) in states of arrested development. They also play in a band, entirely unaware that it shares a name with the band that defined the period of North American white guitar music of their youths. They have a single driving juvenile ambition: to play The Rivoli, an institutional local club in Toronto.
This goal is a premise disguised as a mission statement, and the show, as well as the sequel series that followed a decade later, as well as this film that begins nine years after that sequel series ends, is about the two bandmates, their friendship, their perpetually defeated humble ambitions, and their hilarious, ineffectual idiocy. But really, it’s a delivery system for Matt Johnson’s consistently riveting, inventive writing and filmmaking. The series, and especially the film, is full of metatextual reference that blurs reality and the show.
Johnson combines Canadian hero and buried elementary school time capsule relic Tom Green’s man on the street hidden camera improvisation with George Lucas-tier camera trickery that leaves the viewer slack-jawed. It’s a neat trick, using lo-fi production value and the spontaneity of the non-actors around the cast reacting to what feel like real-life situations interspersed with expert editing and practical effects ingenuity to produce an earned wizardry you couldn’t generate with the combined computing power of a shopping mall-sized data center.
Of course, the film is also a time travel movie that rips its time travel logic, some plot, and the flux capacitor from Back to the Future II and uses it to travel back 18 years to 2008, an era of time and culture that Johnson is clearly infatuated with. It’s heady Quantum Escher shit and also very silly, packed with references to long-canceled entertainers and poorly aged jokes that pass the time between moments that make you slam the heel of your palm against your forehead, trying to figure out how the fuck Johnson and company are pulling this off.
There are times that you could accuse the film of being more clever in its staggering construction than outright funny. The thematic layers of reference can get so thick that it’s a hard film to parse without a pause button and an open laptop. Consider the fuel for the time machine: Orbitz, a lava-lamp modeled non-carbonated Canadian fruit drink that was discontinued way back in 2008. In other words, the engine here is a dumb beverage made to capitalize on the short-lived ’90s revival of a Spencer’s Gift novelty light fixture that was long out of production 20 years ago and now powers a time machine. It’s a perfect fetish object for Johnson and his interests, the ephemera of culture that stick past their expiration dates. But for anyone previously unfamiliar with Orbitz, undue time may be spent turning it over, interrogating it for some hidden meaning, all while five more heady jokes pass you by. Or, you can just shut your brain off for a first viewing and go with Johnson’s genius/clown cracked logic and the genuine warmth that exists between Jay and Matt. It’s a humanity, as was the case with Blackberry, that makes this movie more than a dated reference game.
Which only means that you may not be laughing as hard as you once did at The Hangover if you catch Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, assuming you were cursed to be of a certain age and a prisoner to that bizarre moment in culture. Instead, the film feels destined to become a DVD-shelf comedy classic — Johnson has said elsewhere that a disc packed with antiquated special features like Director’s Commentary and a making-of vignette to explain some of the film’s tricks is imminent — that rewards multiple rewatches. Until then, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie feels like grabbing an Orbitz, traveling back in time, and imagining that fate was shared by Matt Johnson’s extensive collection of Tom Green Show VHS cassettes that he’d watch over and over in his Toronto apartment in the late aughts, years after his countryman and ancestor went off the air and the comedy, as well as the technology, was considered lame.
DIRECTOR: Matt Johnson; CAST: Matt Johnson, Jay McCarrol, Ben Petrie, Ethan Eng; DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: February 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 39 min.
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