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This weekend, audiences are in for an extraordinary adventure featuring a pair of unlikely protagonists who embark on a time-travel escapade in a tricked-out vehicle, desperately seeking their way back to the present era. If this premise rings a bell, it’s no coincidence—it’s a playful nod to the iconic “Back to the Future.”
Introducing “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” an audacious mockumentary from the innovative minds of its creators. The film pushes the boundaries with elaborate parodies that cleverly navigate the edges of copyright law. Among its bold antics is a jaw-dropping stunt where the duo plunges from the heights of Toronto’s CN Tower, alongside at least two dozen other moments that will leave viewers questioning, “How on earth is this permissible?”
The fact that this film even reached the big screen is nothing short of miraculous.
“Audiences watching in theaters should consider themselves lucky, as this might be the only time it will ever be shown,” director Johnson shared with Page Six Hollywood. “The movie is a copyright conundrum. We’re testing the limits of American Fair Use law to the fullest. Our goal has always been to parody, and this project is our most ambitious attempt yet.”
“People who are watching in theaters had better thank their lucky stars, because it’s probably the only time it’s going to be screened, ever,” Johnson tells Page Six Hollywood. “This movie is a copyright nightmare. We’re trying to use American Fair Use law to write to the very extent that we can. We’re always trying to make parodies of things, and this is just the biggest one we’ve ever done.”
To pull off the Nirvanna schtick for the past two decades, Johnson and McCarrol have become de facto experts in fair use. They created a guide for aspiring filmmakers on “How Not to Get Sued” for TIFF back in 2018, and famously keep a copyright attorney on speed dial, carefully plotting legal arguments justifying fair use for each one of their stunts.
The film picks up the story of the duo’s niche Canadian series “Nirvanna the Band the Show,” which follows two down-on-their-luck musicians with one dream: to play at Toronto venue The Rivoli.
“I don’t know how this happened,” McCarrol says of landing Neon as the film’s distributor. “We feature ourselves so unfiltered. We’re not really playing that much of a character. We just tapped into an aspect of our personalities that we’ve been doing for our whole lives, so that feels a bit naked to be getting this sort of platform.”
Aside from McCarrol and Johnson, who also scripted the project, there are no actors in “NTBTSTM,” which relies heavily on off-the-cuff interactions with strangers on the street. They used “Back to the Future” as the “scaffolding” for their story, but largely allowed those improvised moments to dictate how they’d get from Point A to Point B.
That may sound like a stressful shoot to most, but not to the “Nirvanna” guys. “I can sympathize with that feeling of, ‘I don’t know what’s going to be on camera, or what we’re going to shoot, I’ll still stress about the outcome,’” Johnson says. But he and McCarrol have been at this for so long, they thrive in the chaos. “As soon as you realize that the outcome is actually going to be determined way after you shoot it by editors, you can let go of your preconceived notions of what you want.”