I laughed exactly once while watching Green Day's new movie Nimrods, which is dubiously billed as a comedy. It quacks like a comedy, anyway. Characters make outlandish, insanely dumb decisions that result in slapstick gags. They speak in what are clearly supposed to be funny voices. Various quasi-famous comedy types make cameos that are somehow too short and too long at the same time. I didn't laugh at any of that. I did laugh, however, at the moment when all hope is lost and our teenage loser heroes appear to be heading back home to Kansas City, their dream of opening for Green Day unfulfilled, and the opening guitar notes from "Wake Me Up When September Ends" suddenly crash their way onto the soundtrack like the Kool-Aid Man. I don't think I was supposed to laugh at that, but it was pretty funny.
I promise, I was ready to like Nimrods, even if the movie seemed like a hopeless calamity — Green Day, a great and impactful rock band without a whole lot of cinematic legacy or appeal, enlisting the help of Live Nation, perhaps the least punk multinational conglomerate on the face of the planet, to make their Hollywood dreams come true. Grossness was built into its DNA. On the other hand, it's a road trip comedy about a teenage punk band! That means it's relevant to my interests! How long has it been since we got a good road trip comedy? We used to get pictures like that all the time — The Sure Thing, Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Midnight Run, Almost Famous. No more.
What was the last good road trip comedy? Little Miss Sunshine? That was 20 years ago! We're talking about a cinematic tradition that screams out for revival, and I wanted to be charmed. I was not charmed. Nimrods sucks butts. It's a noisy, leaden drag about dumb, obnoxious motherfuckers who would've been beaten up and jailed at least 20 times if they didn't have the good fortune to live inside a movie world where consequences don't exist. Its threadbare storyline and tin-eared characterizations mostly just exist as excuses to string together a bunch of montages set to Green Day songs. I like most of those songs (though not "Wake Me Up When September Ends"). Too bad about the picture attached to them.
Mason Thames, the young star of Nimrods, has an open, likable face, and he previously played the leads in The Black Phone and the live-action How To Train Your Dragon remake. He's fine, I guess, though he doesn't really come off as the scabby and desperate punk that he's supposed to be. He plays Tommy, a young man from Kansas City who's mourning his father. Jenna Fischer, formerly Pam on The Office, plays his struggling and very understanding mother, and she brings just a smidge of gravitas to her too-brief scenes. Nobody else in the movie does anything to build on that emotional foundation. (Fischer, it's probably worth noting, is married to director Lee Kirk, who co-wrote Nimrods with Green Day. She really did him a favor by showing up.)
Tommy is the frontman of Analog Dogs, a pop-punk trio who sound a lot like Green Day, to the point where Green Day wrote at least a couple of the songs that they perform in the movie. Analog Dogs' whole thing is that they like vinyl and tape, which means there's VHS-style footage artlessly chopped into Nimrods throughout. The band's bassist is Tommy's dangerously stupid Pauly Shore-esque best friend Fred, played by someone named Kylr Coffman (not a typo). Then there's Ryan Foust as drummer Chad, a hopeless mama's boy dweeb who the other guys try to coach to be more punk rock. Maybe it's abstractly, theoretically funny to have a drummer character who goes against every drummer stereotype, but there's just not a lot of juice in the broad interactions that this setup gives us.
The premise: The boys in the band piss off Tommy's older brother Wayne, as portrayed by Keen Ruffalo, Mark's son. (I'm honestly surprised there aren't way more nepo babies in this cast.) Since this is a movie with multiple Pauly Shore-esque idiot comic relief sidekicks, Wayne gets his own moron friend to prank call Tommy. Earlier in the movie, Analog Dogs cut a bunch of people off in line to meet Green Day at an in-store and pass them their one-song demo. So Wayne's sidekick pretends to be Tre Cool, inviting the band to Los Angeles to open for Green Day's New Year's Eve show at the Hollywood Palladium. Analog Dogs then steal Wayne's car — one of several acts of car theft in the picture — in order to reach this gig, which they have not verified in any other way beyond one prank phone call. Hijinks ensue.
In their travels, the boys encounter a bunch of supposedly-funny characters, played by Fred Armisen and a bunch of other comedy types who are roughly at or below the Fred Armisen level. They play impromptu gigs at a biker bar and a fantastical middle-of-nowhere junkyard skate-park. They fight, make up, fight again, etc. They make use of various plot machinations that never succeed in rendering this absurd story somewhat more plausible. They also just act like dickheads — at one point, running out on a check at a diner even though we've already established Tommy's mother as a struggling diner waitress. I'm supposed to root for these guys? I don't have the time to listen to them whine.
We don't get too many movies about actual fuckups these days. The characters in Nimrods are genuine fuckups, which is at least something. They cuss nonstop. They never make fun of each other. They indulge in weed and alcohol and, in one total brick of a comedic setpiece, a big bag of mushrooms. In a better movie, maybe those qualities would make them come across as real, flawed human beings, but that's not what Nimrods is. Instead, it's a series of gags, loosely strung together into the vague shape of a movie. We need a love interest, so here's Mckenna Grace as a barely-sketched character who's not even manic enough to be a manic pixie dream girl. We need a mechanism to reach the finale, so here's Chad's mom, showing up at the exact right moment to wag her finger at her son's bandmates. We need a triumphant ending, so boom, here's Green Day.
Did you know Billie Joe Armstrong already made a movie once? Ten years ago, Armstrong played a middle-aged punk rock schlub in something called Ordinary World. Lee Kirk wrote and directed that one, too. Its cast included Fred Armisen and various former Office cast members. I missed that one, and chances are very good that you did, too. In any case, it did not lead the frontman of Green Day to a new career as a leading man. But here he is again, anyway.
Watching Nimrods, I kept trying to figure out who the movie is for. Maybe it's made specifically for Green Day fans. The film certainly flatters them, depicting them all as fired-up young people, not as the middle-aged normies who can now afford stadium-show tickets. But I don't think that's right. I think it's made specifically for Green Day's members and the people who work for them. It's a product of various friendships and corporate partnerships. It's a bullet point on a resume and a flattering portrait of a band that really should not be trusted with its own legacy. It's one of the least convincing portraits of fandom I've seen in years.
Early on, when Analog Dogs meet Green Day at that record store, Billie Joe Armstrong tells Tommy that he should keep playing shows anywhere he can. Green Day did that. They were grubby punk kids who once toured the country in a broken-down converted ice cream van like the one that gets a lot of screen time in Nimrods. But what we don't get from Nimrods is the idea of a band as a smaller part of a scene, a community.
All the characters talk about Green Day nonstop. They don't just like Green Day, at least. Bedroom posters display an affinity for other starter-pack punk bands like Rancid, the Misfits, and My Chemical Romance. Dee Dee Ramone keeps coming up in conversation, as if to give us a non-Pauly Shore precedent of all of the Fred character's grating buffoonery. But we never hear about subgenres, basement-show circuits, or regional scenes. Those things, which existed in Green Day's early days and which endure today, simply have no role to play in the cretinous fairy tale that Nimrods wants to tell.
Green Day love to talk about DIY culture. But in Nimrods, the movie that those guys helped to write, the young punk band's ultimate goal is to open for Green Day, to be around Green Day, to bask in Green Day's reflected glory. It's not a do-it-yourself story. It's a story of doing it with the help of the mythical aging super-rich stadium band. The film doesn't even have the conviction to stick with its own central joke, the fact that these kids are too stupid to realize that they could never open for Green Day. After all, a lesson like that would only get in the way of the endless Green Day montages that are the real reason that the film exists at all. You might be able to laugh at that, but it won't be the good kind of laughter.
Nimrods is in theaters 8/14.
