This blog post has some slight spoilers for Matt Johnson’s 2025 film ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’, which I so highly recommend you watch that I’d rather you stop reading this blog post and immediately find out where it’s playing near you. Don’t worry – I’ll wait.
“Doesn’t that guy look like me?”
It’s a throwaway line found in footage shot by Nirvanna the Band creators Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol back in 2008 – and, nearly two decades later, it is also the catalyst for one of the wildest, funniest films I’ve seen in years. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is many things at once: a time travel film, a mockumentary, and a reflection by the creators on decades of creative output that have been captured on film.
But as someone who has spent the past decade working through archives, I also saw this film as an incredible example of the magic that comes from encountering the past through the prism of archival materials – especially when its your own.
Nirvanna the Band the Show has an interesting relationship with archives – the ‘show’ itself consists of a web series which ran from 2007 to 2009, and then a television series which aired on the now-defunct channel Viceland from 2017-2018. Both iterations are incredibly difficult to find – legally, that is. Fortunately, fans of the show have found their own ways to ‘archive’ the series, and you can eventually find a website or a personal drive that may or may not have the episodes available.
With such a murky state around the preservation and accessibility of the show, it is unsurprising that most people are only encountering Matt and Jay for the first time through the film. But in some respects, that actually makes the magic trick that the two pull with this film even more impressive – it’s hard not to watch in absolute awe at how perfectly the original 2008 footage fits in with the material shot nearly 20 years later. And for me, it makes me even more invested on what the experience must have been like to revisit this material in the development of the film.
Johnson has said that much of the story development was launched by coming across the quote that I started this blog post with, referring to it as a sort of “puzzle piece” that made them want to work backwards, filling in the gaps as to why their younger selves would be encountering their older selves to begin with (Hilliard 2026). And its clear from interviews how meaningful this creative engagement became for them, with McCarrol acknowleging how it showcases so much of their real selves in their “little boyhood journey” by having themselves share the screen with…well, themselves, but 20 years younger. And while McCarrol also notes that little has changed in how they actually shoot their material (Gheciu 2026), its still such an outstanding experience to see how seamlessly insert their 40-something-year-old selves alongside their 20-something-year-old counterparts.
Archives, no matter the format or subject matter, are complex spaces of “time travel”. In moving from object to object, archive to archive, we “time travel” as we attempt to make sense of the narratives that we are trying to follow, while at the same time dealing with our physical and emotional reactions to encountering them. We are not given full access to the past, however, so the “time travel” can be emotionally daunting and exhausting, trying to fill in gaps and make sense of what we are encountering (Tran 2018, pp. 197-198). Working with an archive is not a simple act of perception, but a much more engaging action that can take up a lot of you in the process.
Unsurprisingly, this aspect of archival work is what makes it so fruitful for more direct interventions, including creative outputs. Archival intervention enables creators to grapple with the archive as an agent in creating memory and history, interjecting new meaning into archive material that often come from the act of revisiting the material to begin with (Rosas-Salazar 2021). Such creative engagements with the archive also reaffirms the value of the archive to begin with – not just the value of the material itself, but also the value of engaging with them to begin with (Meehan 2024, p. 214); in other words, the archive is not just a static resource for consultation. It is an entity that can be interacted with, interrogated, re-evaluated, and even remixed. It can be referred to, of course, but it also can be brought into conversation as well. We can interpret our own meanings from our encounters with it, but the archive also has its own biases and perspectives as well that need to be taken into account. And from that point of interaction and friction, we can find a wealth of creative possibilities.
What struck me about Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is how it reflects such a deeply personal encounter of your past self – not just literally, in the sense that Jay and Matt are holding conversations with their younger selves through clever editing. But also in the emotional weight of it as well, that despite it being an absurd comedy (at one point, it is implied that Matt jumps on his sleeping younger self), it also still shows the sort of emotional weight of being in dialogue with your own creative outputs and how time and age can both change so much and also not change much at all. Matt may still dress exactly like his younger self, but when he speaks to a younger Jay, its with the perspective of an older person with years of experience (even if that experience is, in context, decades of failing to book a show at the Rivoli). The film itself is explicitly about time travel, but it also is a vehicle for a different type of time travel as well – the one that is enabled through going through the archive, forcing encounters with the past that seemingly have helped inform the development of the story in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.
Watching this film was such a fun experience (and there’s so much that I haven’t even covered in this post that make the film an immensely worthwhile viewing experience, such as their completely wild guerrilla filmmaking approach which made me whisper, “how the hell did they do that” multiple times!) but it also lit a fire in me when it comes to thinking about engaging with the past, with creative approaches to archives and collections, with thinking about how we can be in productive and transformative dialogues with our past selves.
It made me wanna find my old material – my old photos, videos, posts – and wonder…”doesn’t that guy look like me?”.
References
Gheciu, A.N. (2026). How the ‘Nirvanna the Band’ duo’s troublemaking stunts became a chaotic Toronto film. The Canadian Press. https://halifax.citynews.ca/2026/02/11/how-the-nirvanna-the-band-duos-troublemaking-stunts-became-a-chaotic-toronto-film/
Hilliard, K. (2026). Nirvanna The Band And Wii Shop Update Day Co-Creator Matt Johnson On How Video Games Are His ‘Single Greatest Influence’. Game Informer. https://gameinformer.com/interview/2026/03/03/nirvanna-the-band-and-wii-shop-update-day-co-creator-matt-johnson-on-how-video
Meehan, J. (2024). “Taking Our Own Measure”: Archival Engagement and
Storytelling. The American Archivist 87(1), pp. 208-224.
Rosas-Salazar, V. (2021). The Essay Film as an Archival Practice for Self-Representation. Ekphrasis 2, pp. 56-71.
Tran, F. (2018). Time Traveling with Care: On Female Coolies and Archival
Speculations. American Quarterly 70(2), pp. 189-210.
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