Time-travel comedy grows from web series roots

A movie with a title running 77 characters long, or 106 including spaces, is set to open in South Korea on May 20. The title alone sounds bewildering: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie follows Matt and Jay of “Nirvanna the Band,” a duo largely unrelated to the iconic rock band Nirvana, as they devise a ludicrous plan to build a time machine for a concert and wind up transported back to the day they first met 17 years earlier.

The film itself is just as unconventional as its title suggests, packed with offbeat humor and experimental storytelling choices.

The story centers on real-life friends and creative partners Matt and Jay, played by Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol. The pair share a single dream: performing at The Rivoli, a legendary live music venue in Toronto. To make a name for themselves, they come up with an outrageous publicity stunt involving a skydive from the top of Toronto’s CN Tower.

But the partnership begins to fracture when Jay, who has long gone along with Matt’s increasingly bizarre schemes, decides he wants to perform on his own and abruptly disappears. At that exact moment, the “time machine” Matt has built unexpectedly starts working, sending the two men 17 years into the past. As they struggle to change the future, the film traces the breakdown and repair of their friendship with an eccentric charm that makes the duo’s foolishness oddly endearing.

The project began as a small web series. In 2007, Matt and Jay created the comedy show Nirvanna the Band the Show as an independent creative project. Even then, the premise revolved around their desperate quest to perform at the Rivoli, with each episode built around increasingly ridiculous schemes that often collapsed into spectacular failure.

The project later evolved into a television series, cementing its distinctive comedic world and building a loyal cult following before eventually expanding into a feature film. The movie also incorporates footage shot during the original web-series era, giving parts of the film a rough-edged documentary feel.

The South Korean distributor is comedy collective Bdanus, led by comedian Moon Sang-hoon. The acquisition marks the group’s first venture into film distribution. According to the team, members spent the past year attending international film markets including the American Film Market in Los Angeles and Hong Kong FilMart before acquiring the film at the Cannes Film Market in France last year.

Moon compared the experience to introducing audiences to a favorite restaurant. “If making videos for YouTube every week feels like cooking myself, introducing a film is more like discovering a restaurant that prepares the kind of food I love even better than I could and wanting to share it with people here,” he said.

Korean subtitles for the film were translated by rapper Tablo and his daughter, Lee Haru.


김태언 beborn@donga.com