With its sheer goofball silliness, and unexpectedly great visual effects work, this ridiculous hellzapoppin’ spectacular from Canadian comic and director Matt Johnson will win you over. But if, like me, you’re coming to this from outside the existing fanbase for his web and TV comedy Nirvanna the Band the Show, you will need some time to catch up, and to acclimatise to the gags and the lo-fi klutz aesthetic. (Although, as I say, the downbeat indie look does cunningly coexist with some sensational digital trickery.)

Johnson had a breakthrough hit in 2023 with BlackBerry, about the once vital and then tragicomically obsolete handset device. Now he and his writing-performing partner Jay McCarrol give us a nerd comedy about time travel, inspired by Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future. But this comedy is not interested in BTTF’s Freudian observations about men’s relationship with women. In fact, women play zero role in this. It’s more in the infantilised male spirit of Mike Myers and Dana Carvey in Wayne’s World, or Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Matt and Jay are two slacker fortysomethings from Toronto who, apparently without needing to earn money from any sort of day job, devote themselves to their terrible group called Nirvanna. (The two-n misspelling of the more famous band is … deliberate? Accidental? Anyway it’s part of their overall vibe of abject loser wrongness.) They are always trying and failing to get booked at the Rivoli, a hip Toronto venue. Matt then talks Jay into skydiving from the top of the city’s CN Tower as a publicity stunt which ends in chaos. His next idea is even wackier: install a fake time machine in their RV and claim to be from the year 2008. But then the RV gets hit by lightning when their vehicle reaches a certain speed and … guess what? Their accidental tumble back to 2008 opens an awful psychic wound; Jay is planning to ditch Matt and reset with a solo career.

Why 2008? Good times or bad? There is no explicit rationale. It was the beginning of Obama’s presidency and also the time of the great crash, during which, as it happens, Canada congratulated itself on doing better than other economies. But where another type of film might have looked for some grownup satirical significance, the joke here would appear to be a daft and crazy arbitrariness. You have to relax and go with it. And the weird conviction that Johnson and McCarrol bring to their high concept reminded me of Primer, Shane Carruth’s deadly serious cult film about time travel. If there is a serious point to this film it is how very quickly time goes past while you are trying and failing to make it in the music business. But the laughs are the important thing.