Three of the more purely enjoyable films to play at this year’s SXSW didn’t premiere with star-studded red carpets at the Paramount, launching at other venues around the wonderful city of Austin. You’re going to want to watch for all three of them.
After the premiere of Matt Johnson’s wonderful “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” one could hear the buzz move through the entire city. Standing ovations are kinda rare at SXSW, and even rarer for quirky mockumentary comedies like this one, but Johnson has crafted an immensely likable motion picture, a hysterical love letter to creative partnerships, using the one he’s had for a generation with Jay McCarrol to create something that nods to time travel comedy classics like “Back to the Future” but also has a sharp comic voice of its own. More than any other film at SXSW this year, people were telling me this was their fave of the fest. It might be yours too. You just don’t know it yet.
Johnson, the director of 2023’s excellent “Blackberry,” co-created a web series called “Nirvanna the Band the Show” in 2007. It was an improvised comedy in which Carrol would fiddle around on a piano while Johnson devised publicity stunts to get their duo named “Nirvanna the Band” a gig at the famous Rivoli in Toronto. It was turned into a TV series that ran for 16 episodes from 2017-18, a sort of Canadian version of how Sacha Baron Cohen became a star in that many of Jay and Matt’s on-the-street encounters were unscripted. It would regularly riff off pop culture things beloved by Matt and Jay, and it often called attention to itself with Matt and Jay referring to the camerapeople without ever really explaining why anyone would film these two lovable doofuses.
For “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” Johnson and Carrol use old footage of them making the show in 2008 to start the film, centering on Matt coming up with another publicity stunt. Cut to 17 years later and they’re still trying to get to the Rivoli—the years of hijinks having clearly ground Carrol down. As he considers becoming a solo act, Johnson devises a plan to skydive from the CN Tower, and the footage of them (or someone) doing so is just the first of many times in this film when the line between reality and fiction blurs. A colleague I talked to after the film couldn’t stop trying to figure out what really happened and what was CGI. It’s a wonderful question to have.
After the stunt, a series of events send Jay and Matt back to 2008, where they almost cross paths with their younger selves and get up to some true “Back to the Future” dilemmas. Imagine a variation on “BTTF” in which the filmmaker has footage of younger versions of the characters. It’s wonderfully playful, and it all starts to hinge on one butterfly effect question: What if Matt and Jay broke up 17 years ago?
The 2008 pop culture drops are absolutely hysterical—the first sign that something is wrong and they’re no longer in our time is a smiling Bill Cosby’s face on a magazine cover—and it’s that chaotic energy that I admire the most about “Nirvanna.” It’s a film about people trying to creatively scramble their way to their dreams, and what’s so likable about it is how the movie mimics this improvisational hustle that creative people do from the minute they decide they want to make a living doing what they love. It’s consistently funny, smart, and even sweet, a nice reflection of what makes Johnson a special filmmaker.
There’s a similar deep likability in Matthew Shear’s “Fantasy Life,” a comedy that doesn’t just give Amanda Peet a comeback role but might feature her best screen work to date. After about ten minutes of Shear’s debut comedy, which he also wrote and stars in, I had the thought that it was inspired by the early movies of Noah Baumbach, only to check Shear’s IMDb page and discover that he was in “Mistress America,” “The Meyerowitz Stories,” “While We’re Young,” and “Marriage Story.” He takes what he learned on those sets to craft a delicate character study about a man trying to start the next chapter of his life but getting hung up by the attractive actress who is about to change it.
Sam (Shear) is introduced in a bit of a spiral, seen getting laid off and then suffering a public panic attack in the opening scenes of “Fantasy Life.” After a session with his therapist Fred (Judd Hirsch), Matt ends up getting a job as the “manny” for Fred’s grandkids. These three lovely girls are the daughters of an actress named Dianne (Peet) and a musician named David (Alessandro Nivola), who heads out on the road on tour for a few months, leaving his wife to hang out on the couch and watch “Battlestar Galactica” with Sam. Sometimes you just want someone to watch “BSG” with.
However, “Fantasy Life” is not your traditional infidelity comedy. In fact, it’s far from it. Shear employs a very episodic style, jumping forward to key moments in the story of his time in Dianne’s sphere. As a character, Sam can get a bit lost, playing straight man as he cedes much of the humor and even development to more vibrant personalities like those played by Peet & Nivola, along with a stellar supporting cast that includes appearances by not just Hirsch but other legends like Andrea Martin, Bob Balaban, Jessica Harper, Holland Taylor, and Zosia Mamet.
Everyone here is good to great, and the professionalism in the ensemble helps the script over some shallow patches, but it’s truly Peet’s film, leaning into a sort of metatextual aspect of her career. Peet has worked consistently in TV but hasn’t had a film role since 2015—so there’s added gravity when Dianne speaks of not acting in a decade and thinking that she’s aged out of Hollywood. Peet gets vulnerable in ways we haven’t really seen before, and while “Fantasy Life” is entertaining on its own terms the most exciting thing about it is fantasizing about the comeback roles it could lead to in Peet’s career.
Finally, there’s the unexpectedly tender “Brother Verses Brother,” an original musical comedy told in one unbroken shot that uses the true stories of its subjects to make what Francis Ford Coppola called “live cinema.” The leads—Ethan and Ari Gold—walk the streets of San Francisco, singing and talking off the cuff, as they head to their 99-year-old father’s apartment, worried that he may not be OK given he missed a scheduled meeting, which is something he rarely does. It’s hard to tell how much of Ethan and Ari’s dialogue is improvised, or if the people they encounter always knew what was happening. When they ran into a member of the band Weezer in a bar, I paused to wonder if he just happened to be there. I love that.
Ari gets director credit and Ethan the music, but this is clearly a sibling collaboration, one that reportedly started with a letter from Ari to Ethan that started “Imagine you’re playing your music in Kerouac Alley, and no one’s paying attention.” From there, he pitched what became “BvB,” with the Golds telling a very personal story about art, sibling rivalry, love, and their father. Herbert Gold was a well-known author, publishing 25 books of his own in the Beatnik era, and he passed a deep creative streak on to his boys. Gold’s director statement points out that twins “live without cuts,” so he used that idea to fuel a surprisingly lithe and nimble piece of work. There’s a version of this movie that gets showy, leaning into its formal choices and amplifying its character in a manner that this very natural comedy never does.
“Brother Verses Brother” is about those nights we all have when everything seems a little heightened, when we argue a little more vehemently and love a little stronger, when memories of our childhood fuel visions of our future. It’s a sweet, smart movie that’s not only unlike anything I saw at SXSW this year, but anything I’ll see anywhere all year.
Credit: Source link
