With a few days before Christmas and mere hours left before the semester breaks for the holiday, Tommy (Mason Thames) cannot take it any longer and makes a run for it from his classroom, picking up his delinquent best friend and bandmate, Fred (Kylr Coffman), along the way.  As the two waste away their break with nothing in particular, they find out that Green Day, their favorite band, is having a meet and greet at the local record store.  They call up drummer Chad (Ryan Foust) and quickly put down a mixtape to share with the band.  Catching wind of this, Tommy’s brother, Wayne (Keen Ruffalo), plays a prank on the boys, convincing them that Green Day loved their demo so much that they want them to open for their big NYE concert some 1500 miles away in Los Angeles, CA. 

Lee Kirk directs Nimrods, a road trip comedy he co-wrote with participation from Green Day band members Billie Joe Armstrong and Mike Dirnt.  The film premiered at the 2025 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, but did not break theatrically until August the following year when Inaugural Entertainment placed in on just over 1,000 screens in the United States.  Across the film’s 107 minutes, Kirk et al seek to break the conventions of a jukebox musical while reveling in the traditions of a no parents, no rules buddy comedy. 

Production designer Adam Reamer really taps into the look and feel of the mid-aughts when the band was in their heyday with their 2004 album “American Idiot,” so much so that it becomes almost jarring when modern technology makes its rare few appearances on screen or is referenced.  It is not truly anachronistic with the facts of the film, but between the visual aesthetic which Reamer achieves as well as the tone on the page which mimics well the Judd Apatow-produced comedies of the time and their imitators, it can leave audiences a little lost at sea in so far as to when the events of this film are actually taking place.  Similarly, Stacy Caballero dresses the boys in the styles of the time complete with more layered tee-shirts than can be counted, plenty of baggy hoodies, and scissor-fitted flannels.  This choice was probably made more out of necessity so as not to incur the cost of digitally de-aging the band by some twenty years, and safe for a few incidents where it seems to stretch credulity, much of this can be accepted at face value as the script presents Tommy as a real analog hound stripping the band from as much modern, digital tech as possible while on their road trip. 

The film, despite being an ensemble comedy, filters itself through Tommy’s experience, and it allows Thames to keep his resume full of varied titles after the success of The Black Phone (2021-) series and the live-action adaptation of How to Train Your Dragon (2025).  He sets the tone of the film for his cohort – kind-hearted yet goofball Fred and uptight, upper-class Chad – but he oftentimes finds himself playing the straight man in the comedy of errors of his own making, while also getting to tiptoe into the realm of a romantic lead in a blossoming relationship with grassroots indie fest-follower Olivia (Mckenna Grace).  He rushes through the first act of the film with an adolescent infallibility that almost endears us to him, further so as he awkwardly stumbles through a meet cute and tentative flirtation with Olivia, but Kirk, on the page, saddles him with a strangely presented and strained relationship with his mother, Jodi (Jenna Fischer), who is left to raise the brothers by herself after her husband passed some years prior to the film. 

Fischer is nearly unrecognizable in the role of the overstressed and overworked mother, and as anyone raised by a mother can see in the film, her frustrations with Tommy are all coming from a place of love; a place that, in his youth, he is unable to recognize as such and sees it instead as totalitarianism.  That makes his antics all the more grating on us as an audience as we find ourselves falling more in sync with Fischer, and while her star power may be what led most of her role past the opening fifteen or so minutes relegated to voiceover phone calls, the onus is on Thames to charm us back into rooting for him and his pals to succeed.  This is where Kirk’s script is rather smart because Tommy’s goal in the narrative is an as of yet unbeknownst to him life lesson, so while we may like to see more of Fischer on screen as Jodi, the film ultimately makes the right call in limiting her screentime and letting her character’s influence work through Wayne and his number one accomplice, Keith (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio) which also opens Nimrods to tangentially exploring the fraught relationship between the two brothers who have never quite reconciled with each other after their father’s passing. 

The third act of the film is when it transitions to being a commercial vehicle for Green Day, which is not exactly a slight against the film as this was the entire point and purpose of the project, but some two decades removed from their peak relevance, Nimrods‘ show-stopping NYE show leaves much to be desired from our view nestled into the resereved ahead of time plush recliner of the cinema.  While the Live Nation production card at the front of the film can mostly be forgiven as a necessary evil, this concert sequence, which is supposed to be lively and pump of the audience, reeks of desperation.  Thankfully, Kirk’s harvest has come in with abundance, so when Ryan Brown in the editing suite cuts to the character moments with the boys, we feel like we are in on the joke and get excited along with them. When the focus shifts to Armstrong on stage, however, all the air is let out of the balloon, and some of that is also certainly due to David Robert Jones keeping his camera at such a distance and so stationary that Nimrods never taps into the third act, blast-the-hits that many a standard music biopic does to win over its audience before sending them on their way.  In a cruel twist of fate with how it was Tommy who was supposed to go up on stage and make a fool of himself, instead, it is the band that backed this film that ends up with egg on their face in the final throes of their own film.  This is not even a knock against the music because when Nimrods is acting a jukebox musical, it is a true delight, but this finale hardly feels like an appropriate endpoint for everything else the film has laid out; even the resolving action is shuffled along because, as far as the film is concerned, the show is over, and it is time to go home. Armstrong has left the building, but you may still catch him at the Denny’s enjoying an early-bird special.