Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie      Director: Matt Johnson Cert: 15AGenre: ComedyStarring: Matt Johnson, Jay McCarrol, Jared Raab, Ben Petrie Running Time: 1 hr 41 minsThere’s a moment in the criminally underrated Anne at 13,000ft, when Matt Johnson’s character goes on his second date with the title character following a wedding hook-up. The disbelieving look on his face when she brings him to meet her mum is a work of art, but typical of the mockumentary milieu that Johnson has fashioned over the past decade.In the gleefully unpunctuated Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, Johnson and Jay McCarrol, another master of the comic reaction shot, revive the semi-fictionalised versions of themselves from their cult web series of the same name, later adapted into a Viceland sitcom. In it the two Toronto musicians devote years to securing a booking at the Rivoli, a popular Toronto venue.Every attempt to play the club involves, not actual music, but a needlessly elaborate stunt. During the Scooby Doo opening gambit – shot without permits – Matt persuades Jay that parachuting from Toronto’s CN Tower into a Blue Jays game will generate enough publicity to force the Rivoli’s hand. The scheme collapses, leaving Jay exasperated by his constant companion’s cartoonish antics. Matt’s solution is to build a time machine in their dilapidated campervan by reverse-engineering Back to the Future, complete with a home-made flux capacitor powered by the discontinued soft drink Orbitz.[ Matt Johnson of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie: ‘If you’re not embarrassed by your old work, you haven’t grown’Opens in new window ]The pair duly arrive in 2008 and encounter younger versions of themselves, ingeniously allowing Johnson to combine newly shot scenes with footage filmed almost two decades earlier for the original series. The joins are almost impossible to detect. Characters move seamlessly between old and new material, past conversations and throwaway moments become plot points some 18 years later. The time shift also places Matt and Jay in a cultural landscape that celebrates Bill Cosby and other cancelled stars, while the pair become increasingly distracted by the possibility of redrafting their own history.Johnson films the action in the same freewheeling documentary style as the television series, mixing hidden-camera encounters with unsuspecting members of the public and increasingly ambitious set pieces. The result preserves the scrappy, improvised amiability of the original while expanding it into a diabolically clever comedy, poignantly pivoting around two chums as they confront the distance between youthful certainty and middle age. As a writer-director, Johnson has successfully swerved into biography with Blackberry and the upcoming Bourdain origins story, Tony. Let’s hope he never outgrows the gonzo. In cinemas July 1st