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Early on in their new film, Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, go to a Canadian Tire in Toronto. The two men ask an unsuspecting staff member if a type of “snippers” would be able to cut through a “kind of harness”.

The worker asks, confused, “What are you trying to do, though?”

The question is (relatively) easy to answer in the context of the scene: the men are trying to jump off the CN Tower into Rogers Centre (formerly called SkyDome), where the Toronto Blue Jays play, to promote their show (which they don’t have booked) with their band, Nirvanna the Band, at a bar called the Rivoli.

The question, when asked about the movie itself, gets a bit more complicated.

Johnson and McCarrol created a web series called Nirvana the Band the Show in 2007 that documented the two friends rolling around Toronto getting into various hijinks while attempting to book a show at the Rivoli. Then, in 2017, the two added an “n” for a TV series on Viceland called Nirvanna the Band the Show.

The movie version, predictably called Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, takes that original concept to its logical conclusion: an hour and a half romp through both Toronto (yes, there is a scene at Drake’s house) and time itself as Matt and Jay attempt to play said show at the Rivoli.

There are inside jokes to do with the web series and TV show and then a boatload of Torontonian/Canadian references that wider audiences will likely miss.

For instance, when the duo uses a bottle of Orbitz to time travel back to 2008 (seriously), the question they ask to confirm what year they are in is, “What do you think of Russell Peters?” The Canadian version of the Inception spinning top is, apparently, Peters’ relevancy.

“Almost everything we put in this movie was stuff that we just thought was funny,” says Johnson in a Vancouver hotel room. “It wasn’t until we started screening in the U.S.—we had the world premiere in Austin, Texas [at South by Southwest], where nobody got the jokes—that we thought, ‘Uh oh, that was a mistake.’ ”

But in some ways, says Johnson, that also doesn’t really matter.

“I strangely think that audiences outside of Canada find the movie a lot crazier and maybe more exciting because the regionality of it plays as a sci-fi element,” he says, “in the same way that we would react to the British Office or Borat or Summer Heights High. The regionality makes it seem more like world-building.”

Adds McCarrol: “There are types of inside jokes that are still funny when you’re not in on it. We grew up with The Simpsons, which was at such a high level of comedy in its early episodes. Some of those references we definitely didn’t get as kids, but it was still so fun and irreverent. Maybe the fact that they’re being weird is funny.”

This is Johnson’s fourth feature film as a director, and his third time playing a fictionalized version of himself. In addition to acting and writing, McCarrol is a musician (he and his sister make up the band Brave Shores) who has scored all of Johnson’s films. Their previous collaboration, Blackberry, while a Canadian production with mostly Canadian actors and about a Canadian story, marked their first foray into widespread notoriety as it featured It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star Glenn Howerton in one of the main roles.

But that film was fairly straightforward (as much as a biopic in which Howerton, playing real-life Canadian businessman Jim Balsillie, shouts, “I’m from Waterloo, where the vampires hang out!” can be straightforward).

Nirvanna is anything but.

As McCarrol says, “weird” is probably accurate no matter what country you’re from. It’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on or how the filmmakers pulled off many of the scenes in Nirvanna, most of which feature a hidden camera handled by cinematographer Jared Raab that captures unsuspecting members of the public.

In the one sequence that looks staged, Jay plays a sold-out show at a Toronto venue to a raucous crowd. But, nope.

“People were there to see [Hamilton rockers] the Arkells,” says Johnson. “Jared has a relationship with them, and they did us a huge favour and let Jay up while we were shooting. That concert is a real concert—nobody is playing along.”

Okay, so what about the whole CN Tower scenario? Without spoiling anything, it’s a bit mind-boggling to think about how they pulled it off. Were they worried about the legality behind it?

“Yes, we were worried,” says McCarrol. “And we can’t exactly talk super freely about that stuff.”

Johnson can talk with varying degrees of freedom about his next two projects. The first, which is wrapped, is A24’s Tony, starring Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) as a young Anthony Bourdain getting his start in a kitchen in 1976 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. McCarrol did the score.

“In some ways it’s bigger than [Nirvanna], and in other ways it’s a lot smaller,” says Johnson. “It’s a super-modest character piece about a 20-year-old guy in the ’70s working as a dishwasher. But in terms of production and the size of it, the budget, it’s bigger. And yes, the personal stakes for me are quite high.”

Johnson, a huge Magic: The Gathering fan, is also slated to direct a film based on the popular card game.

“It’s going to be a gigantic movie,” he says. “It has more in common with Nirvanna than the Bourdain one does.”

No word on if the Magic: The Gathering movie will have jokes about Jian Ghomeshi. 

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie comes out in theatres on February 13.