Nimrods isn’t a typical band movie.
Although the project is being billed as “a Green Day comedy,” its three members, Billie Joe Armstrong, Tré Cool and Mike Dirnt, are not the main focus of the project; instead, the film is a coming-of-age road trip story about three buddies who drive across the country when they’re pranked into thinking their band will open a New Year’s Eve show for Green Day.
“I always wanted to have a movie that was like we were in the background of it and it’s kind of based on the music conducting the whole narrative,” frontman Armstrong told The Hollywood Reporter at the L.A. premiere on Wednesday. “I love like Rock ‘n’ Roll High School and movies like that that were kind of cult films but had a big impact on me growing up — like A Hard Day’s Night, which actually starred The Beatles.”
Many of the band’s real-life stories are incorporated into the movie, though, and they appear in small roles as themselves, taking the stage at the Hollywood Palladium for the big New Year’s performance. Their songs also soundtrack much of the movie, but it’s quite a different route than most bands take, either in filming documentaries or handing over their stories for a biopic. (Asked if Green Day would ever want a more traditional biopic treatment, Armstrong said, “That’s not on my radar.”)
Director Lee Kirk was tasked with figuring out what the film would be when Armstrong came to him saying he wanted to do a Green Day movie that ended in a New Year’s Eve show. “We started talking about what that would be and realized it would be fun if it’s a band trying to get there,” Kirk explained. “I thought, why doesn’t the band have some crazy stuff happen to them that happened to Green Day in all their years driving around as a band? And so I started quizzing them, they gave me all these crazy stories and I folded them into the movie. And then from there I just found all these little details of their lives and their story and they’re all kind of easter eggs.”
Mason Thames, Kylr Coffman and Ryan Foust star as the road-tripping teens, along with appearances from McKenna Grace, Jenna Fischer, Angela Kinsey, Fred Armisen, Sean Gunn and Keen Ruffalo. Nimrods hits theaters on Friday.
