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.          

Producers: J.J. Abrams, Hannah Minghella, Jon Cohen, David Robert Mitchell, Matt Jackson and Tommy Harper   Director: David Robert Mitchell   Screenplay: David Robert Mitchell   Cast: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery, Jordan Alexa Davis, P.J. Byrne, Anne Gee Byrd, Emily Kuroda, Hudson Meek, David Alexander Kaplan, Simms May, Grayson Thorne Kilpatrick, Pilot Bunch and Michael-Christian Moore   Distributor: Warner Bros.

Grade: C

It’s fitting that a movie about time-travel—specifically, dinosaurs magically transported to a Spielbergian suburb of 1982—should come across as a throwback itself, an attempt to recapture the tone of the escapist crowd-pleasing PG-13 thrillers of the eighties.  Sad to say, David Robert Mitchell’s effort to channel the feel of the movies of that era short-circuits.  “The End of Oak Street” is too silly and repetitive to work except as a nostalgia trip to a cinematic past no more recoverable than the Jurassic period.

Mitchell, who scored with the low-budget horror flick “It Follows” in 2014, is working on a much bigger scale this time around, dependent in great measure on the visual effects team supervised by Jay Cooper. But the budget doesn’t appear to have been big enough to support really cutting-edge technical work: the prehistoric critters on display aren’t embarrassingly bad, but they’re hardly amazing either.  Nor is their integration with the human cast as seamless as one might hope.

The predictably troubled family at the center of the action are the Platts.  Greg (Ewan McGregor) is hiding the fact that he’s been laid off from his regular job, trying futilely to cover the loss of income by delivering pizzas.  His unfulfilled wife Denise (Anne Hathaway) is secretly writing a novel at night in the basement.  Daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella), a science nerd, dreams of going to Cornell, but doubts she’ll get in.  And her younger brother Brian (Christian Convery) rides around on his bike with his pals (Grayson Thorne Kilpatrick, Pilot Bunch and Michael-Christian Moore), but he’s also being pursued by a bully, Haden Tucker (Hudson Meek), who blames him for breaking his younger brother Charlie’s (David Alexander Kaplan) arm. 

But despite the internal strains, all are devoted to the family dog, Starbuck (as in “Battlestar Galactica”), though their nasty next-door neighbor Mel (P.J. Byrne) is furious about the mess the mutt is creating in his back yard, and especially about a huge pile of excrement he assumes that Brian and his pals have dumped there as a prank.

More strange stuff happens.  Former book editor Mrs. Huddleston (Anne Gee Byrd), a neighbor who’s helping Denise with her novel, finds a peculiar growth in her garden, a weird flower that appears to be a plant species extinct for millions of years.  Then blazing lights in the sky, accompanied by terrible thunder and raging wind, are followed by odd rustlings in the surrounding forest.  They’re gradually revealed to be caused by raptors and other assorted prehistoric beasts unaccountably transported to the Oak Street neighborhood.  They prove very dangerous to folks like Mrs. Huddleston and Mel.  And the Platts’ attempts to escape fail because the area has been cut off from the rest of the city by cliffs, swamps and jungle. 

The family hunkers down in their house (though the supposedly bright Audrey sneaks out to listen to music in the car, even if doing so would wear down the battery), but eventually they venture into the streets, especially after Brian climbs out a window in search of Starbuck.  From that point the movie becomes a pretty rote series of chases and close shaves, with special reliance on the cliché in which one or another of the Platts is featured in the foreground while some danger (be it a giant snake or a Tyrannosaurus Rex) approaches stealthily from the background.  A brief, loopy interruption occurs when Haden attacks Brian until Charlie pulls him away; he’s apparently still consumed by a desire for revenge despite the greater danger all are facing.

There are also few jokes along the way (like Denise having Greg pose for a Polaroid in front of a couple of Brontosauruses engaging in sex), but overall the action is relatively tame, though aiming for tension; there are some corpses lying around, but fewer than one might expect, and blood is in surprisingly short supply.  Throughout Michael Giacchino’s score, abetted by Paula Fairfield’s sound design, adheres to the dull pattern of revving up to a shattering chord during a perilous episode before abruptly falling away as editor John Axelrad cuts to a quieter aftermath. It merely accentuates the episodic structure the movie’s fallen into. 

Toward the close the little troupe is increased by the addition of Jeanette (Jordan Alexa Davis) before one of the family falls heroically in battle.  By then Audrey has begun speculating about worm holes and time portals as explanations for what’s happening, but even a reference to Stephen Hawking can’t lend a vestige of plausibility to such nonsense.  Nonetheless Mitchell latches onto the hypothesis, and contrives an escape around a portal—a shimmering translucent orb—at a house where Mrs. Valcourt (Emily Kuroda) wields a shotgun against a horde of attacking dinos that allows the survivors to jump back to a time in 1982 shortly before the dinos appeared on Oak Street.

There’s little logic to this, of course, but even less to what follows—a tacked-on coda that allows everyone to live happily ever after, even people who have to be resurrected by one of the most ludicrous tricks in recent movies.  But admittedly in the eighties these kinds of pictures twisted themselves into contortions to make things turn out all right in the end. 

The cast show a remarkable degree of commitment to the material, given how inane most of it is, and production designer Maya Shimoguchi makes the besieged neighborhood look attractive, even if it seems rather underpopulated (by humans, that is, not dinosaurs).  Thankfully, Erin Benach’s costumes don’t go in for period exaggeration, and Michael Gioulakis’ widescreen cinematography is more than adequate, given the necessity of splicing together live action footage with so many visual effects.

In the eighties empty-headed blockbusters like this filled multiplexes during the summer, and folks gorged on them in spite of their absurdities.  Many who grew up with them might enjoy a throwback like “The End of Oak Street,” if only as a blast from the past.  Though old-fashioned popcorn movies can be fun, however, this one ends up tasting rather stale.