A certain amount of beautiful stupidity comes with believing your teenage band could actually become something. That blind conviction – the kind that tells you stealing a car and driving across America might somehow be a perfectly reasonable response to an invitation to open for Green Day – sits at the heart of Nimrods, writer-director Lee Kirk’s rowdy, affectionate ode to big dreams, loud music and the wonderfully irrational confidence of youth.
Inspired by stories from Green Day’s years spent touring long before Dookie transformed them into global superstars, Nimrods follows Tommy and his bandmates as they race from Kansas City to Los Angeles after he receives what he believes is the opportunity of a lifetime: opening for Green Day on New Year’s Eve. What Tommy doesn’t know is that the invitation is an elaborate prank courtesy of his older brother, turning their cross-country adventure into a fool’s errand that may ultimately prove more meaningful than the destination itself.
Rather than simply recreating Green Day mythology, Kirk uses pieces of Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool’s history as the foundation for something distinctly its own; a coming-of-age film where cassettes, VHS tapes, flip phones and homemade flyers evoke an analogue adolescence without trapping the story in nostalgia. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s a film that refuses to tell its young characters to become more sensible. Sometimes being unreasonable enough to chase the ridiculous dream is precisely the point.
Speaking with our Peter Gray as the film releases across theatres, Kirk discussed finding the line between Green Day fact and fiction, making analogue nostalgia accessible to a generation raised on social media, the real-life story that inspired one of the film’s sweetest threads, and why he hopes Nimrods might make some teenager pick up a guitar.
I know you’ve described building the fictional story (of Nimrods) out of the DNA of Green Day’s history. Was there even anecdote from Billy Joe, Mike, or Tré they loved so much when they told you, but you ultimately realised this is too specific or too sacred to fictionalise in any way?
Oh, that’s interesting. You know, nothing felt too sacred. Something that was very sacred to the story was Billie Joe meeting his wife, Adrienne, which is how we ended up having the Olivia character in the movie when the band stops.
The story that Billie Joe told me was that they had stopped in Minnesota and were playing a show, and he met Adrienne there. They hit it off, and he said, “I’m gonna come back. We’ll reroute the tour to come back,” you know? So that’s how that happened in the film. Those were kind of the seeds of that piece of the story.
And they were telling me that, on the day when he met Adrienne, the other guys were shooting bottle rockets and fireworks at him. They were shooting them and hitting him and Adrienne with these fireworks. I wanted to do that in the movie, but I wasn’t allowed. It was just too dangerous to be shooting fireworks in the movie.
So there’s a scene when the ice cream truck is leaving, and Fred’s character is hanging out. He’s got sparklers that he’s kind of waving around, and that was the seed of that idea. So that’s how I got the fireworks in there.
There’s something interesting about making a film for young people that esthetically remembers a world before they were born. How conscious were you of making nostalgia inviting rather than exclusionary? So that a 15-year-old doesn’t feel like they’re watching somebody else remember being 15?
Sure. Yeah. No, I was very aware of that, and I was trying to find, you know, there is an interest in analog that’s really happening with young people right now, so that worked in my favor for sure. But I had to figure out a way to tell this story without cell phones, really.
There’s a moment in the movie when Tommy asks Olivia for her number, and she writes her number on his shirt. Well, I don’t really think that happens very much anymore. I think it’s more, “Can I Snap you?” or “You Snap me,” or something like that, you know?
So there was a little bit where I was hoping that the audience would go with it, especially with Tommy being a character who doesn’t really have social media. He has a flip phone. He’s not really involved in that. So he’s just kind of paying attention to what’s going on around him in the tactile world and less on a screen.
It was nice to see the older technology here. The VHS tapes and the cassettes. I feel like teenagers can watch this now and it doesn’t feel like it’s necessarily 1986 or 1996 or 2006…it feels like everybody can relate to it. It really walked that fine line.
Man, that’s fun. Yeah, you know, talking to Billie Joe and Mike and Tré about those days, you had to get out and drive. You had to go around, you had to make flyers, you had to just play your songs everywhere and give out cassettes and stuff. And there’s something so fun about that, you know. There’s something about being resourceful as a young person and having to do that. So it felt like a really fun idea to explore in this film for these kids, where it’s like, you want it, you’ve got to go get it. You can’t just put it on your phone. You’ve got to actually go after it, you know?
I feel like so many coming-of-age films eventually tell young people to grow up and be sensible. To leave dreams behind. This argues the opposite. That there’s value in being unreasonable enough to chase something ridiculous. Was that important to you?
Absolutely. I mean, that was something Billie Joe talked about in one of our early conversations. He talked about how you have to be a little crazy. You have to have crazy dreams. I mean, to get to where he’s at, they had to dream big and dream crazy and be unreasonable in their dreaming. You know what I mean?
I’m sure there were people around them who thought, “You guys are just crazy kids. You’re troublemakers.” But they had a vision for what they wanted to do. And, yeah, I would love it if a kid sees this movie and says, “You know what? I want to dream big too.”
I mean, I have kids. My kids are 12 and 14, so hopefully that rubs off on them as well.
Tommy’s journey starts with something that’s objectively quite cruel. But then the lie ultimately pushes him towards something genuine. What interested you the most about building the film around a contradiction like that?
Well, honestly, that started with a lot of the movies that Billie Joe and I talked about from those eras, you know, the ’80s and ’90s. They had an older brother character who was kind of an important piece of them. So when we decided to do the movie this way, and I realised I had an older brother character, I thought, well, this should be part of the story. It should set off the whole thing.
And then one of the questions was: “Should the audience know that these guys are on a fool’s errand?” or should I hold that until the very end of the movie? But it felt to me like it wasn’t necessarily about whether or not they’re going to open for Green Day. It’s about the journey, you know. It’s about the journey getting there.
I also really wanted to have the Wayne character kind of in pursuit and have their moment at the end of the movie. So, in order to have that, you kind of have to understand what’s going on in the story. I decided to do it the way I did, and I’m happy with how it feels. The goal was really just trying to find an ending that was still satisfying, but didn’t work out the way that maybe the audience thought it was going to work out.
I can see the version of the story where you keep that a secret, but I think it ultimately works better because it gives the audience more of a push to really want these guys to succeed. And, obviously, Green Day’s fingerprints are all over this without it being a Green Day biopic. Was there a point during writing where you established a rule for yourself about how much Green Day was too much Green Day?
Oh, that’s a good question. Yeah, the rule was that I really wanted to try to take their story, or just ingredients of their story and their lives, and not put them literally into the film, but sort of alter them a little bit. So they famously drove around in a bookmobile, and these kids are driving around in an ice cream truck, you know.
But I think one of the things that came directly from them was the puppet, Gravy. Mike did have a puppet named Gravy, and I just thought, I can’t think of a better name than Gravy, so we kept that name.
But everything else, I sort of took and spun it just slightly so that it would work in the film. Even stuff like, you know, Billie Joe’s dad died when he was an eight-year-old kid. So that part of the story was based on his journey and his family’s journey. I wanted to have that in there, but I also wanted to be careful with it because that’s obviously a very personal part of his life.
So I wanted to be careful with how much I told in the story and how heavily I leaned into it. I just tried to find a nice balance where it’s simply part of the fabric of the story.
As you mentioned before that you hope this film rubs off on your kids and their aspirations, and I know you mentioned in your director’s statement about wanting parents and teenagers to watch this together, but those two generations may respond to completely different things. One would recognise the cinematic language, and the other would recognise the emotional experience. What do you hope they actually talk about afterwards?
Oh man, you know, first of all, I hope they talk about the music. One of the fun ideas to play with in this film is how music brings people together. And there are a lot of moments in there where there’s music playing, people smiling, dancing and having a good time. So I think I would start with that. I would start with the music bringing people together.
And I think that’s one of the fun things about a Green Day show. You do see a lot of parents there with their kids. I took my kids to Green Day, and you look around and everyone’s smiling, everyone’s having a great time. For that moment, it’s just a beautiful thing. Everyone is there together, strangers and all, you know.
So I think I would start with that. If they were having that conversation on the car ride home, that would be fantastic.
With the name of their band being Analog Dogs, there’s the running joke of their name being mispronounced throughout the film. Where did that name come from? Was that ever part of Green Day’s story?
Oh, that came from me really wanting to have this kind of texture in the movie of this older stuff. I definitely wanted to have the camcorder footage as a sort of nod to ’90s skate videos and things like that. I wanted to have that texture in the film, but I had to find a way to make it feel organic to the story and not just feel like something I’d laid on top of it.
So my first thought was, if this band is into analog, and somehow the name has “analog” in it, then I think I can really lean into that. So that was really where it came from. And then someone pointed out to me that the word “anal” is in Analog Dogs (laughs), you know, and that just became, “Oh, this is funny. We’ve got to play with this.” That wasn’t originally there when I thought of the name Analog Dogs. That was just the name, and then the joke came later.
It really is one of those things – it’s the simplest joke, but it works every time. And I know you’ve said that your dream is that a teenager finishes Nimrods and asks for a guitar. What would mean more to you? Discovering that kid eventually became a musician, or discovering they tried, failed spectacularly, but still remember that period as one of the best times of their lives?
Oh wow, that’s amazing. I mean, obviously, it’d be really cool if someone said, you know, 20 years from now, “It all started with Nimrods. I watched the movie Nimrods and I said, ‘I’ve got to get a guitar.’”
My son and my daughter are both into music. My son plays a number of instruments, and my daughter’s a singer. I don’t have any musical ability, so it’s been really fun for me to watch that in them. And, you know, will it lead to something? Who knows? But it’s really something I wish I’d had growing up. I loved music growing up, but I didn’t play anything, and I’m jealous of them when I see them. They’ll go out and jam, and my daughter will be singing, and they’ll be making up songs. It’s really cool.
So regardless of whether it means anything in terms of leading to them becoming rock stars, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just about the fact that they’re doing it, and they have this other language to express themselves in.
Did you ever have the conversation about if the Analog Dogs existed beyond the final frame, do you think they actually made it as a band? And, more importantly, does it matter if they made it?
Well, you know, I asked Billie Joe’s son, Jakob, to write the songs, and he wrote them with Billie Joe. They wrote the songs together. And the reason for that was I wanted this to be a good band, you know. I feel like we root for them more if we’re like, “These kids are good. They’ve got good stuff.” So, yeah, I think they continue after the movie. I think they continue because they have good music, they have good taste, and they write good songs.
Nimrods is now screening in theatres in the United States.
