“Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” is comic nirvan(n)a

Riotous Canadian comedy is the funniest movie of the year

Canadians Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol made the funniest movie of the year. (NEON)

“Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie” is a magic trick of a movie. The Canadian comedy initially comes across as a scruffy, low-budget indie about two lifelong Toronto buddies (Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol playing versions of themselves). At first, it seems like it will be a wry, character-based comedy that won’t stray far either creatively or budgetarily from its modest web series roots.

Then Matt and Jay leap off the CN Tower and parachute onto the roof of the nearby Rogers Centre baseball stadium.

It’s a stunt that would make Tom Cruise jealous. And it puts the audience on notice that seemingly anything can happen in this wildly inventive and absolutely hilarious movie, one that has to be seen in a theater with an audience.

There’s really no need to have seen the web series that Johnson and McCarrol started in 2008 (I hadn’t) before watching the movie. The ongoing premise is that Jay and Matt have a band called Nirvanna the Band that they want to book at a Toronto club called the Rivoli. Nirvanna has nothing to do with the much-better-known Nirvana, who could easily get booked at the Rivoli, although I note that the extra “n” forces someone to give their name a distinctly Canadian pronunciation with a long “vann.”

For 17 years on the show, Matt has been coming up with ever more elaborate schemes to get them onstage at the club, none of which have been successful. (The running gag of this Sisyphean struggle is that the duo were probably then and certainly now way too big to play the 230-seat Rivoli.)

Hence the parachute jump, which Matt thinks will generate so much publicity that the Rivoli will just have to give in. Like all of the movie, the scheme is shot mockumentary-style with handheld, sometimes hidden cameras, with Matt and Jay interacting with real, often bewildered Torontonians as they try to smuggle parachutes past CN Tower security. It’s like “Jackass,” but with way more apologizing.

After the parachuting plot misfires, Matt immediately jumps to an even more audacious plan. I won’t spoil the details, but it involves an old RV, a defunct Canadian fruit-flavored beverage, and an extended homage to an iconic movie from the ‘80s.

It just gets crazier and crazier, with one “How did they do that?” moment after the other. But, let me stress, that question is rhetorical. I absolutely do not want to know how they did that. I don’t want to learn the secrets of how they pulled off the parachute jump or anything else in the movie, any more than I want to know how Penn sawed Teller in half. The joy of the magic trick is in the illusion and in the execution, the feeling that anything could happen on screen.

And it wouldn’t work as well if Johnson and McCarrol aren’t such an enormously charming comedic duo. With his unfortunate fedora and boundless enthusiasm, Johnson (who directed this movie along with the very funny “Blackberry”), is like an excited little kid, pulling out the whiteboard to explain why THIS time it will work.

He’s balanced out beautifully by McCarrol, the more mature, understated compatriot who is dragged along half-willingly on Johnson’s escapades, and is starting to question whether he’s wasted his life as Matt’s wingman. “Nirvanna” finds a lot of laughs but also not a little poignancy in these aging millennials, still plugging away towards a lifelong dream that matters only to them.

The film is full of Canadian in-jokes, including a reference to disgraced talk show host Jian Ghomeshi that completely sailed over the heads of the American audience I watched the movie with. But even if you don’t know your Ottawa Rough Riders from your Saskatchewan Roughriders, I can’t imagine there will be a funnier comedy released in 2026.

“Nirvanna The Band the Show The Movie” opens Friday in theaters. In Madison, it will play at AMC Fitchburg 18.