Green Day’s ‘Nimrods’ is a rowdy punk road movie

Green Day’s new film, “Nimrods,” believes in the enduring power of a black leather battle jacket. In one poignant early scene, Jenna Fischer’s character pulls that well-worn garment out of a box to give to her teenage son Tommy, a young punk rocker about to hit the road to LA to open (he thinks) for Green Day at the Hollywood Palladium. The kid chokes up. The jacket belonged to his late father, whom he remembers hovering over a record player, bearing songs from a more thrilling world. He dons it like armor for the chaos to come.

“There is that thing about the leather jacket, where it carries so much more weight because he’s a musician and his dad’s one too,” said Green Day’s singer Billie Joe Armstrong. “We see families coming to Green Day shows now — two, three generations. It’s amazing to see a young person that’s 14 years old that gets into ‘Dookie’ for the very first time, a record that’s over 30 years old. You’re always trying to make music that you’re able to play in the future. We were always kind of old souls in that way.”

Green Day’s new feature film, written and directed with Lee Kirk, is an old-soul road trip movie. “Nimrods,” out Aug. 14 in theaters, is a smitten, profane yet often moving snapshot of a young band striking out on their own, drawn from Green Day’s gritty beginnings in the East Bay punk scene of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

In a time when teen life is subsumed by alienating digital technology and an understandable risk-aversion, “Nimrods” takes the yearnings of its young punks seriously. “You have to be delusional to be in a band,” Armstrong said. “It takes a certain kind of dreamer. I remember trying to get that first gig. It was like, ‘Oh, my God, if we could only get out of this living room and then play our first show at Gilman.”

“That was the thing we had that we could call our own,” added bassist Mike Dirnt. “When people are playing music together at a young age, that may be all that they have, but that’s their emotional vessel. That’s their out.”

“Nimrods” is not a Green Day biopic, though the trio of young actors playing the band Analog Dogs (Mason Thames, Kylr Coffman and Ryan Foust) do evoke the band’s wiseacre gestalt, and Green Day’s Armstrong, Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool make a few knowing cameos.

It’s a narrative-driven story indebted to the Ramones’ “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” and the Who’s “Quadrophenia,” following the teen band to LA as its members naively believe they’ve scored the gig of a lifetime (actually, a prank pulled by an older brother). The film has the weed-stinky vibe of scruffy teen hangout flicks like “Dazed & Confused” and “SLC Punk,” with surrealist, winking tour drama akin to Charli XCX’s recent film “The Moment.”

Green Day’s decade-spanning catalog of spit-flecked pop-punk forms both the soundtrack and the heart of the movie. “They write songs about so many different emotions, so it really lends itself when you’re building a story,” Kirk said.

“Some stuff like ‘Basket Case’ would be kind of obvious, but I was really surprised at how well the deep cuts came in,” Armstrong said. “At one scene, the car is driving down the highway, and you hear a song called ‘Haushinka,’ which was unexpected, but it fit so perfectly. We actually put that song back into our set list.”

Yet Kirk, a writer-director who previously cast Armstrong in the 2016 aging-punk comedy “Ordinary World,” wrote the film as a more universal tale of a young band throwing caution to the wind while trying to heal a fractured blue-collar family in the suburban Midwest.

“The movie was about a family going through a crisis, about this kid trying to find trying to find his community and trying to reconcile with his family,” Kirk said. (He’s married to Fischer, best known from “The Office,” who nails a small but dryly funny role here.) Armstrong’s son wrote much of the original music for the movie, and Green Day’s catalog — especially resonant here after Armstrong’s recent sobriety at the behest of his family — binds the movie’s rebellions and reconciliations.

Tribune News Service