Producers: Ryan Kroft, Anna Keegan, Green Day (Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool) and Tim Perell   Director: Lee Kirk   Screenplay: Lee Kirk   Cast: Mason Thames, Kylr Coffman, Ryan Foust, Jenna Fischer, Angela Kinsey, Fred Armisen, Bobby Lee, Jolene, Keen Ruffalo, Ignacio Diaz-Silverio, Sean Gunn, Josh Fadem, Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, Tré Cool and Mckenna Grace Distributor: Inaugural Entertainment

Grade: C

Devotees of punk rockers Green Day will require no prodding to embrace “Nimrods,” a teen road trip movie whose plot the band members helped writer-director Lee Kirk shape, using their own experiences.  Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool also appear in the picture, briefly near the start and in extended concert footage at the end.  Unsurprisingly, the result pays tribute to their enduring success—as well as to their fandom. 

For the uninitiated, though, the movie will probably come across as a lesser-tier genre piece, messily constructed and more successful as fan service than as a generically raucous teen comedy with a sentimental streak.  It also lionizes Green Day; their music, including the album that provides the movie’s title, pretty much fills the soundtrack, and in the end they come across as pretty good guys—dei ex machina, in fact, at least as far as our putative heroes are concerned.

Those would be the three members of a Kansas City garage band fronted by lead singer-guitarist Tommy (Mason Thames).  He’s introduced as a rangy, hooded high school kid who seems little more than an obnoxious rebel without a pause, until it’s revealed that his father had recently died, leaving him and his older brother Wayne (Keen Ruffalo), as well as their mother Jodi (Jenna Fischer) grieving.  Frazzled Jodi is struggling to keep things together, and Wayne’s bought an old cab he drives as a rideshare to raise money.

Tommy’s late dad was into music, and so he cherishes the tapes he left behind, forming the band that he calls, for its non-digital ways in his honor, the Analog Dogs.  (The name gives rise to an oft-repeated joke, of course).  The other members are bassist Fred (Kylr Coffman), a dumb-ass dude with green-dyed hair who’s devoted to Tommy, and Chad (Ryan Foust), a well-mannered, bespectacled dweeb who’s a great drummer.

Chad is such a goody two-shoes, in fact, that when his parents win tickets to the Kansas City Green Day concert and tell him he can invite anyone he likes to go with him, he asks his mom and dad rather than Tommy and Fred.  That encourages them to break into the line at a meet-and-greet with the band at a local record store so that Tommy can give them a demo tape, which they take without appearing too interested.

That gives Wayne, who’s miffed with his brother, an idea for a nasty prank.  He has his boneheaded pal Keith (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio) phone Tommy pretending to be Tré Cool to tell them that Green Day was so impressed with the demo that they want Analog Dogs to open for them at their big New Years Revolution concert in Los Angeles.  Jodi naturally refuses to drive them cross country for such an imaginary gig, so Tommy steals Wayne’s cab and, despite the lack of a license, takes to the road with Fred and Chad.

Despite that, the cops never get involved.   Instead, Wayne and Keith jump on a motorcycle to track them down, periodically trying to assure Jodi that all is fine—a ruse that eventually collapses, resulting in her reappearance.

But most of the movie consists of a series of episodes portraying the stop-and-start journey of the Dogs to California, financed with funds from his mom’s credit card by the reluctant Chad after their cash runs out and punctuated by montages and scenes of impromptu performances they give before a variety of crowds along the way.  Wayne’s cab is destroyed, for example, when moronic Fred proves that he doesn’t know the difference between gas and diesel, nor how to fill a tank anyway.  The resultant lack of transport is then solved by the guys’ inheriting an abandoned ice cream truck after entering a contest at a roadhouse run by a woman who, like most folks they meet, is an avid Green Day fan (and willing to believe that the Dogs will play with them). 

The need to inject some puppy love into the equation is solved when Tommy falls for Olivia (Mckenna Grace), a pretty young thing he encounters at one of their later stops.  By far the strangest encounter comes when Tommy and Fred are stranded at an isolated motel where they dicker for a room with Jim (Fred Armisen), a creepy clerk who seems to know entirely too much about a nearby asylum and patients who have escaped from it.  Understandably, editor Ryan Brown has some difficulty linking everything together smoothly.

Despite all the setbacks, including Chad’s temporary defection, the Dogs eventually reach L.A. where each, in his own way, gets validation from Green Day whether they deserve it or not—although an officious security guard named Otis (Bobby Lee) tries to interfere at every turn.  (Rest assured, the signature Pink Bunny is prominently involved.)  But even more important, Tommy and Wayne have a teary fraternal reunion, their rift settled in a treacly scene that brings a measure of familial closure.  That and Tommy’s reunion with Olivia end things on a distinctly sentimental note.

There’s an engaging combination of scruffiness and rowdiness to “Nimrods,” thanks to the deliberately ragged work of production designer Adam Reamer, cinematographer David Robert Jones and editor Brown; and Thames, whose career has taken off with his roles in the “How to Train Your Dragon” and “Black Phone” franchises, makes Tommy likable even if the character actually isn’t much of the time.  Fischer, the wife of writer-director Kirk, hasn’t much to do as his mom, but Ruffalo has a few good moments as his brother.  Coffman and Foust, however, can get irritating as his pals—Fred’s idiocy a particular annoyance (a trait equally maddening in Diaz-Silverio’s doofus Keith).  Both characters certainly fit the definition of the bozos indicated by the title.  In addition to Lee and Armisen, watch for cameos by Angela Kinsey, Jolene (Blalock) and Sean Gunn, the last as a drunken mechanic.

Though it’s certainly tolerable, though, the movie ultimately comes across as too slipshod and, as far as Green Day is concerned, too deferential to excite those who aren’t already fans of the band.  As far as teen road movies go, “Nimrods” is strictly middle-of-the-pavement stuff.