There’s an infectious sincerity running through Nimrods that makes it difficult not to root for. On paper, it’s another coming-of-age road trip about three underdogs chasing an impossible dream. In execution, however, it plays like a love letter to the scrappy youth comedies of decades past, complete with muted colours, fuzzy VHS inserts, a wall-to-wall punk soundtrack and just enough youthful recklessness to make every bad decision seem like the only sensible one.
Despite taking place in the present day, you’d swear someone unearthed this from a forgotten box of VHS tapes. That nostalgic DNA is no accident. Writer-director Lee Kirk deliberately evokes the films he grew up on – the likes of The Breakfast Club, The Goonies, Footloose, Vacation and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – while filling his contemporary America with camcorders, cassette recorders and other analogue remnants that give the film an amusingly timeless quality.
Inspired, too, by Green Day‘s own early touring years, the film follows Kansas City punk trio the Analog Dogs (Mason Thames, Kylr Coffman and Ryan Foust) after Tommy (Thames) receives what appears to be the opportunity of a lifetime: an invitation for the band to open for Green Day on New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles. There’s just one problem. The whole thing is an elaborate prank orchestrated by Tommy’s older brother, Wayne (Keen Ruffalo).
Tommy doesn’t know that, of course.
Desperate to believe his life might finally be changing, he steals Wayne’s car, piles in his bandmates and sets off from Kansas City to Los Angeles, hell-bent on making it there in three days. The frequent mispronunciation of the Analog Dogs’ name makes for some of the more humorous interactions across the running time, as their increasingly chaotic journey takes them through a succession of people and places that feel like increasingly unlikely stops on some great punk-rock pilgrimage.
Plot, though, is almost beside the point.
Kirk is far more interested in capturing the spirit of youthful optimism than constructing an airtight narrative. The Analog Dogs bounce from one absurd encounter to the next, stumbling into biker bars, dive venues and roadside disasters with an almost cartoonish level of luck. When one problem disappears almost as quickly as it arrives, it barely registers because the film never asks its audience to worry about realism. It simply wants everyone to enjoy the ride.
There’s also something rather fitting about that looseness given how deeply Green Day’s own history is embedded within the film. Kirk developed the story with Billie Joe Armstrong, eventually mining Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool for stories from their younger years and reshaping those anecdotes into fictional incidents and character details. Nimrods consequently isn’t a Green Day biopic, nor does it particularly want to be, but there’s enough of the band’s DNA running underneath its fictional adventure that the Analog Dogs’ scrappiness feels affectionately informed by musicians who actually lived some version of it.
That easygoing attitude becomes the film’s greatest strength. Rather than trying to manufacture high stakes, Nimrods thrives on the small victories: discovering your people, finding confidence on stage and believing, if only for a few days, that the impossible might actually happen. It understands that the best road trip movies aren’t about reaching the destination – they’re about who you become while getting there.
And beneath all the stupidity, there’s a genuine affection for teenagers who haven’t yet figured out what adulthood is supposed to look like. Tommy’s journey isn’t merely about believing he could open for Green Day; it’s about believing that choosing music, however uncertain that future might be, is a legitimate choice in the first place. Kirk’s celebration of pursuing a life outside other people’s expectations gives the film’s familiar underdog narrative an appealingly rebellious heartbeat.
The humour lands far more often than it misses, with a handful of genuinely hilarious exchanges sprinkled throughout. A wonderfully awkward conversation between Jenna Fischer and Coffman about “blowing roadies” is worth the price of admission alone, perfectly capturing the film’s goofy, punk-rock sense of humour without feeling like it’s trying too hard to shock.
Not everything works. When the film pauses to deliver its more heartfelt moments, it occasionally asks audiences to invest in emotional payoffs that haven’t quite been earned. Character arcs can feel rushed, and the screenplay sometimes mistakes sentimentality for emotional depth.
Yet somehow those shortcomings become easier to forgive once the film settles into its Christmas-to-New Year’s framework. This isn’t just a punk comedy; it’s a holiday movie wrapped in leather jackets and guitar feedback. Hope, reinvention and found family naturally become part of the equation, allowing its more earnest moments to land with enough warmth, even if they don’t always arrive organically.
Green Day’s fingerprints are all over the production – not only through an energetic soundtrack, but as producers, occasional on-screen faces and the dream that keeps the entire story moving. Their music is woven throughout rather than simply dropped in as obligatory needle drops, furthering the sense that the film is less interested in worshipping Green Day than celebrating what bands like them can represent to kids discovering music for themselves.
That may ultimately be Nimrods‘ sweetest quality. For all its deliberately retro aesthetics and affection for another era of studio comedy, its nostalgia isn’t entirely backwards-looking. It’s about passing that feeling forward: the discovery of a band, the first time making music with friends feels genuinely important, and that wonderfully naïve moment when picking up a guitar seems capable of changing everything.
Nimrods won’t redefine the genre, and it’s smart enough not to try. Instead, it embraces every familiar beat with confidence, delivering a scrappy, funny and undeniably heartfelt celebration of youthful ambition, loud music and the wonderfully naïve belief that your entire future can change over the course of one unforgettable road trip.
Sometimes, that’s more than enough.
THREE AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Nimrods is screening in theatres in the United States and select Australian theatres now.
