Green Day's movie '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 L.A. 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.”

Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, Tré Cool and director Lee Kirk.

“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 L.A. 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.

“When someone says they had a rough moment in their life, like a father-daughter situation where the father was sick, and they were like, ‘Your song was me and my dad’s song, it really got us through a lot of stuff,’ it’s a great feeling,” Armstrong said. “It’s humbling. Music biz stuff is not the fun part, but then something will come up and you go, ‘OK, now that’s that’s why I do this.’ ”

Green Day performs during the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in 2025.

The movie is seeded with nods to Green Day lore, scripted over long sessions riffing with the band over its tour catastrophes. Cool recalled the mayhem of a 1991 European winter tour when the band played 64 shows in three months.

“The van caught on fire, but that doesn’t deter you from just wanting to jump in and get to the next town,“ he said.

One scene at a menacing biker bar was inspired by a van breakdown in San Luis Obispo, where Green Day had to play two impromptu shows in three days to pay back the crusty punk mechanic who fixed it. Another harkens to Green Day’s famously mud-soaked Woodstock ’94 set.

“People had been miserable for like three days, stuck in the mud. Then it became this fun interaction with the crowd, throwing mud and hay back and forth. Then it became a melee. Then it became a giant brawl on stage,” Dirnt said. “That was the point where I was like, ‘Oh, wow, we’re really big now.’ That was the thing that put it over the edge.”

With its young band cutting demos on a four-track cassette recorder, “Nimrods” could have been set in 2026, 1996 or 1976 — phones and social media are practically nonexistent in the plot. One pivotal moment comes when Mckenna Grace’s punk-singer character hands Tommy a charmingly Xeroxed flyer to a warehouse gig and gives out her phone number rather than a Snapchat handle.

“The challenge was to make a movie for generations of Green Day fans, so I decided that a fun way to do that is if Tommy is into analog. He’s into vinyl, he records on a four-track, he’s not on social media,” Kirk said. “I was trying to figure out how to get rid of the phones. It opened the door for us to have this film that is set in present day, but feels like it’s maybe 1992 and 2026. The idea was to make a film that feels sort of timeless, that a guy who’s 58 can relate to as well as a 14-year-old kid.”

After days of seedy mayhem getting to L.A. (one gruesome scene with Fred Armisen almost takes it into horror terrain), the band ends up at a Green Day gig at the Palladium: Not the one Analog Dogs had hoped for but a life-changing night nonetheless. It’s hard not to walk out of “Nimrods” with a little spark of desire to start a punk band and hit the road with your buddies.

Hopefully the generation of Gen Z musicians depicted in the film still lust over the chance to try, even as a wretched economy makes road-dogging harder today while digital fame beckons instead.

“That’s kind of the way a DIY network is supposed to work — everybody’s helping each other out,” Armstrong said. “We would always ask as we were on stage, ‘Does anybody have a place that we could stay?’ And, sure enough, somebody would step up, every single time. But I’m sure it’s harder now. Gas was a lot cheaper then.”

Green Day performs at the 2026 Super Bowl

The modern world is off-stage in “Nimrods,” but Green Day has been more at the forefront recently. They headlined Coachella in 2025, a rare heavy rock band to top the most influential festival in the U.S., delivering a raucous and thrashing set unlike any in the last decade of Coachella headliners.

“We just wanted to go up there and kick everybody’s ass, and that was what we did, comprehensively,’ Armstrong said, laughing.

Armstrong will lead a Ramones 50th anniversary all-star band (with Travis Barker, Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, and Ramones bassist C.J. Ramone) at a tribute show at Hollywood Forever Aug. 30. Green Day recently opened the Super Bowl just outside its Bay Area hometown, kicking off before Bad Bunny played a historic halftime show. Green Day caught a little flak for its “American Idiot” performance, where the outspoken left-leaning act typically updates the lyrics to lambast President Trump, as they did George W. Bush two decades ago, but demurred on there.

The band members said they considered what to do at that moment of national prominence but that they hoped the music would speak for itself.

“It’s a platform, but also sometimes, it just doesn’t feel right,” Armstrong said. “I didn’t want to get in the way of Bad Bunny because of what was going on with ICE, where his message was much more powerful. I think we would have come across as being a bit more belligerent.”

As the U.S. slinks toward the midterms during ongoing crises with the Iran war, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, inflation and beyond, Green Day is atop a dwindling class of stadium bands able to credibly speak to younger and older audiences. It’s a role they didn’t seek out but will embrace if the kids of “Nimrods” are going to have a future.

“When we first started, we were not about politics at all, even though we came from a very outspoken scene,” Armstrong said. “But then ‘American Idiot’ came up out of nowhere, done with heart from a place of total confusion about why the world is changing into this dark and ugly place. I think that rings true, especially right now. It’s like, ‘We went to the park today, we brought the dogs, it was so great, and, oh, yeah, Trump just bombed Iran.’ How can everything be so normal and absolutely insane at the same time?”