Great Scott! The Canadian Back to the Future Parody Conquering the World

Forget the DeLorean. Forget the flux capacitor. Forget desperately trying to get your parents to fall in love before you disappear from a photograph.

In Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, time travel involves two hopeless musicians, a homemade machine and a journey back to Toronto in 2008, a strange, distant era filled with Black Eyed Peas songs, questionable advertising campaigns and people who were still allowed to smoke indoors. Probably.

Based on the cult Canadian web series Nirvanna the Band the Show, the film follows Matt and Jay, played by director Matt Johnson and co-writer Jay McCarrol, as they attempt to secure a gig for their two-man band at Toronto venue the Rivoli.

That is their dream. Not Wembley. Not Madison Square Garden. Not even the main stage at Glastonbury.

The Rivoli.

To Matt and Jay, however, it might as well be the moon.

Their increasingly ridiculous mission eventually sends them hurtling through time in a glorious parody of Back to the Future. When they arrive in 2008, they initially fail to realise the experiment has worked. Then they begin spotting the cultural fossils: an old Bill Cosby magazine cover, an advert featuring former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle and a billboard displaying disgraced Canadian broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi.

For Canadian audiences, it is a darkly funny parade of extremely specific national memories. For everyone else, it is apparently still hilarious.

McCarrol told the BBC that American audiences consistently laugh at the Ghomeshi billboard, although he is not entirely convinced they know who they are looking at.

“Americans seem to love when something’s extra Canadian,” he said.

That is fortunate, because this film is Canadian enough to arrive carrying maple syrup and apologising for the inconvenience.

There are jokes about the CN Tower, the Toronto Blue Jays, Canadian Tire, local television presenters and the Skydome. officially called the Rogers Centre, but apparently only by people who enjoy correcting strangers. The story even revolves around Orbitz, a discontinued Canadian soft drink that looked like someone had dropped tiny lava lamps into a bottle.

Yet, rather than making the film inaccessible, all that specificity appears to be the reason it is travelling so well.

Following a hugely enthusiastic premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, the movie was acquired in the US by boutique distributor Neon. It has since played to packed cinemas, received glowing reviews and developed audiences as far away as South Korea.

The film was never designed to become an international hit. Johnson, who previously directed the excellent BlackBerry, and McCarrol expected little more than a small Canadian theatrical run.

That lack of expectation gave them the freedom to make something completely distinctive. They did not flatten the jokes for international audiences or pause to explain why the Rivoli matters. They trusted viewers to understand the spirit of the joke, even when they missed the reference.

That is the secret ingredient.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie may borrow the time-travelling mechanics of Back to the Future, but its charm is entirely its own: scrappy, silly, proudly local and bursting with the energy of two friends making each other laugh.

Sometimes the smallest films travel the furthest. Even without a DeLorean.