‘Nimrods’ review: Green Day gives familiar road trip comedy a punk-rock pulse
- Nate Adams
- 3 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Courtesy of Inaugural Entertainment
Inspired by those early years of being “American Idiots,” California pop-punk royalty Green Day lend their chops, music and general ethos to the amiable road-trip coming-of-age comedy “Nimrods,” producing the film and supplying plenty of earworms for its soundtrack, most of them pulled from the band’s older catalog. The easiest comparison is “Superbad” with a Green Day twinkle in its DNA, complete with raunchy banter, teenagers trying to score booze outside a convenience store and an increasingly ridiculous adventure that eventually involves stealing a car and traveling cross-country. There’s plenty of scrappy spirit keeping “Nimrods” moving, even if the movie itself rarely amounts to much more than a generic road-trip comedy with some Green Day songs dropped into it. Sometimes we do, in fact, walk a lonely road.
Young heartthrob of the moment Mason Thames stars alongside Kylr Coffman and Ryan Foust as Tommy, Fred and Chad, three chippy 17-year-old goofballs who make music together in their garage under the name Analog Dogs, which, honestly, isn’t a bad band name! When Tommy’s older brother pranks the boys into believing Green Day heard their demo, loved it and wants them to open at the Hollywood Palladium on New Year’s Eve, they suddenly have a very small window to scrounge together enough money and resources to get themselves to Los Angeles in time for the gig.
Naturally, getting there becomes the entire point, and “Nimrods” strings together the expected assortment of detours and colorful characters along the way. There’s a grungy biker bar hosting a battle of the bands, a cute punk rocker (McKenna Grace) who also happens to be in a band, and a strange motel encounter capped by a cameo too juicy to spoil.
Director Lee Kirk keeps the movie bouncing from one misadventure to the next with enough energy that the familiarity doesn’t become fatal, but there’s also a nagging sense that “Nimrods” is content to borrow the greatest hits of better teenage comedies without finding much of its own perspective. The Green Day connection gives the movie a personality on the surface, but strip away the soundtrack and references and there isn’t much distinguishing this particular journey from countless other movies about teenagers chasing one last impossible adventure before adulthood comes knocking.
Thankfully, the soundtrack hums along, mostly supplied by Green Day, of course, and I’ll never tire of hearing “Minority” or “Know Your Enemy” blasted at just the right moment. The problem is that the movie occasionally leans on those needle drops to generate a rebellious energy the screenplay hasn’t entirely earned for itself.
Everything about “Nimrods” is fairly one-note, and its characters never develop enough beyond their familiar archetypes for the coming-of-age material to carry much emotional nourishment. There are hints of something more interesting underneath all the adolescent chaos, particularly in the boys’ desire to create something together before life inevitably starts pulling them in different directions, but the film is more interested in getting to the next joke, song or roadside mishap than digging much deeper.
What ultimately saves “Nimrods” from becoming background noise are Thames, Coffman and Foust, who find the right rhythm with one another and capture that flamboyant earnestness that can only come from three adolescents completely convinced their garage band might actually be their ticket to something bigger. Their chemistry makes the friendship believable even when the screenplay surrounding them feels assembled from the spare parts of other coming-of-age comedies. They’re the ones tasked with carrying most of the movie, and their goofy sincerity makes the journey considerably more endearing than it has any right to be.
“Nimrods” may not reinvent the teenage road movie, nor does it have much to say once you look beyond its punk-rock packaging, but there’s enough charm in its young cast and enough Green Day blasting through the speakers to keep the wheels turning. It might be a boulevard of broken dreams we’ve traveled down plenty of times before, but with these three idiots riding shotgun, it’s still a pretty fun trip.
Grade: B-
NIMRODS is now playing in theaters.
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