'We have hundreds of thousands of fans': How a Canadian Back to the Future parody became an international cult hit

A low-budget riff on the time-travelling classic set in Toronto, Nirvanna the Band the Show was never intended to be more than a passion project for its two creators. But it has found a devoted following, from the US to South Korea.

One of the funniest moments in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, the widely acclaimed Canadian comedy that has become a surprise global success, hinges on a brief glimpse of an outdated billboard plastered across the side of Toronto's MuchMusic building – a municipal landmark legendary to locals and the former nexus of one of the country's largest media empires.

Based on the cult web series Nirvanna the Band the Show, the film stars director Matt Johnson and his co-writer Jay McCarrol as a pair of ambitious but air-headed musicians attempting to make it with their two-man musical group, Nirvanna the Band. In the film, as in the show, they banter, plot zany schemes, and interact with real people who have no idea they're being filmed, like a more polite version of Borat.

In the scene in question, Matt and Jay have just taken a Back to the Future-inspired journey to the past, travelling in their jerry-rigged time machine from modern-day Queen Street West to the same downtown strip in 2008. At first, the duo is unaware that their sci-fi gambit has worked – until they spot the relics of a distant, quaintly un-politically correct era. The cover of a defunct alt-weekly boasts a profile of Bill Cosby. An ad on the back of a bus features the smiling face of disgraced Subway spokesman Jared Fogle. A sightseeing bus passes blaring a Black Eyed Peas hit with an unfortunate title.

The punchline is a billboard emblazoned with the visage of Jian Ghomeshi. The long-time host of CBC Radio's Q, a hip talk show with a rotating cast of celebrity guests, Ghomeshi was a somewhat obscure but beloved big fish in Canada's constitutionally small-pond media ecosystem – until 2014, when a sexual abuse scandal made him into a figure of national notoriety. For Canadian viewers who cringingly recall the controversy, the callback is darkly hilarious.

But it also raises the question: would anybody outside of Canada get it?

Johnson and McCarrol have been somewhat amazed by the reaction to that moment – and the film as a whole. Since its premiere last September at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was rapturously received by local audiences, the offbeat, charmingly idiosyncratic Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie has been doing the seemingly impossible – reaching escape velocity from the atmosphere of Canadian cinema and touring to enthusiastic crowds across the globe.

In the US, the film was picked up by respected boutique distributor Neon and opened to rave reviews and packed cinemas earlier this year, and now this weekend the movie arrives in the UK, ready to prove itself to an international cohort of fans all over again. And so far, the Ghomeshi joke seems to have landed.

"We went on tour with the movie, and we watched it with all these American audiences, and everybody would laugh at the photo of Jian Ghomeshi," McCarrol tells the BBC from his home in Toronto. "I don't know if they somehow knew who he was, or if they just thought it was some irrelevant man that we were showing, but it gets a big laugh every time. Americans seem to love when something's extra Canadian."

That must be a relief for the duo – because an almost unbelievable percentage of the humour in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie would qualify as "extra Canadian". There are jokes about Toronto's CN Tower and the Skydome (officially, but never casually, known as the "Rogers Center"), about baseball team the Toronto Blue Jays, the Toronto-based morning talk show Roz and Mocha, and the retail franchise Canadian Tire.

The plot itself – that the boys wind up in the past and accidentally alter the future – revolves around a decades-old soft drink called Orbitz that was produced exclusively in Canada. And as in the original series, Nirvanna the Band's key objective is to land a gig at the Rivoli, a shabby, run-of-the-mill club near Toronto's Spadina Avenue that they treat as if it were Madison Square Garden. It's funny – assuming you know what the Rivoli is.

"We have to trust that audiences are smart," McCarrol explains. "I mean – how funny will it be when they realise that the Rivoli is not even that crazy a venue. That's going to be a fun thing for the audience."

As a director, Johnson has been steadily growing a respectable career: his previous feature, the corporate drama Blackberry, was a modest hit in the US, and he has just completed the Anthony Bourdain biopic Tony for A24, which is set to be released next month. Nirvanna the Band, with its oddball humour and quasi-documentary style, was always a passion project more than a mainstream play for Johnson – a brief diversion before moving onward and upward. No one anticipated its success. 

McCarrol says that he and Johnson had "no big expectations" for the Nirvanna the Band film, assuming their ceiling was "maybe a limited theatrical run in Canada". But lack of expectations also liberated them creatively to lean in to the Canadianness that had defined the original series – first on the web in 2008, and later as a short-lived but critically acclaimed show for the Vice network in Canada in the mid-2010s – rather than avoid Canadiana for the sake of some hard-to-define international appeal. "Anything that seemed too Canadian was going to give us an edge," McCarrol says. "We'd be proudly saying, 'Look, this is a strange environment that we're in. Look at where we are.' And never explain it."

That cultural specificity – and off-kilter national pride – has indeed been regarded as a kind of highlight among critics abroad. "By focusing so minutely on the if-you-know-you-know details of Toronto, Johnson plays up the idea of it as being oddly intimate despite being a major cosmopolitan city," Jake Cole, a US film critic who has been a fan of Johnson's work for many years, tells the BBC. "And this perfectly fits the ongoing mission of Johnson's persona, who aspires not to the American rock star dreams of diamond sales and world domination but merely to play one of Toronto's small clubs."

It's been surprising to Johnson and McCarrol to witness first-hand what audiences around the world have found surprising. After one of the first screenings, Johnson has said, a group of tourists from Germany confronted him about something they found shocking. "There was so much jaywalking!" they exclaimed. Earlier this year, the film opened in South Korea, where Nirvanna the Band has "been building a following", McCarrol says. "We have probably hundreds of thousands of fans around the world now. To our younger selves, we would have been like, 'Are you kidding me? That's insane!'"

Family drama Blue Heron is another Canadian film that has enjoyed widespread international acclaim recently (Credit: Janus Films)

McCarrol is well aware that the film's success has been near-miraculous, especially in a film landscape that rarely sees Canadian movies making headway in the US or elsewhere. But this year, in addition to Nirvanna the Band, Sophy Romvari's Blue Heron and Chandler Levack's Mile End Kicks, both also unmistakably Canadian, have received rave reviews and robust theatrical distribution across the States, suggesting that things may be changing. (Blue Heron also opened in the UK last week.)

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For Nirvanna the Band in particular, however, "there were a lot of barriers to entry" for a prospective audience, McCarrol says.

"There's two non-star 40-year-old dudes starring in this, just indulging themselves in something that looks very strange and lo-fi. There are a lot of things working against us being the kind of movie where you see the trailer and go, 'I have to see that.'"

But both Johnson and McCarrol are immensely grateful that their "inside joke" of a project has found an audience eager to be on the inside. "It's been a really pleasant surprise that so many people have found this movie," McCarrol says. "We never expected Nirvanna the Band to make it so far out there – and around the world, too."

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is released in UK cinemas today and is available to stream in the US.

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