Nimrods review

I went into Nimrods skeptical because I don't even particularly like Green Day. I know their music. Of course I know their music. I'm an elder millennial. Green Day has basically been playing somewhere in the background for my entire life.

I know the singles. I know the hits. There are two or three songs basically everybody my age knows. But I'm not sitting around listening to Green Day albums. So when you tell me somebody made a Green Day movie, that's not an automatic sell.

This turned out to be one of the better band movies I've seen in a while.

The setup is that three teenagers in a garage band manage to hand Green Day a demo at a record-store appearance. A prank then convinces them that Green Day has invited them to open a New Year's Eve show in Los Angeles. The kids believe it and set off from Kansas City for California.

That's your movie. Three teenage idiots in a band believe they're about to get their big break, so they get on the road and go chase it. Classic coming-of-age band movie, and it works.

The Green Day music is used really well. Obviously, Green Day was deeply involved with the project, so whenever one of their songs comes in, it's there because somebody understands exactly what that song means and where to put it.

The kids worship these guys. Green Day is basically their Beatles. The whole thing is an ode to garage bands, to getting together with your friends and playing music badly until maybe eventually you play it well, to believing when you're 17 that your shitty little band could somehow become the biggest thing in the world.

Then the credits connect that back to pictures of Green Day when they were basically those kids themselves. That all works.

Here's my problem. None of these are 2026 teenagers. Absolutely not.

These are 1998 teenagers who have somehow been dropped into 2026 and nobody told them. The way they talk is wrong for now. The way they dress is wrong for now. The way they interact is wrong for now. The amount of time they spend physically together without staring at their phones is wrong for now. Their entire relationship to music is wrong for now.

These are millennial kids. Maybe late Gen X. Maybe very early 2000s. But this culture where a bunch of teenagers are just milling around smoking, drinking, listening to albums, starting garage bands and physically existing together for hours without everything being mediated through their phones does not exist like this anymore.

I wish it did. Maybe that's part of why I liked the movie.

The filmmaking even reinforces it. The texture of the thing feels old. Not 1960s old. It feels 1995-to-2005 old. The whole thing feels like America somewhere around 1997, and apparently we're supposed to be in 2026.

So the movie operates in this weird space that is almost magical realism, except the magical world is just America 25 years ago.

It's a millennial dream of what teenagers still are, or maybe what wealthy millennials who made it through that period wish teenagers still were. These filmmakers grew up around this particular musical culture, became successful, and appear to have preserved the world they remember in amber. Then they populated that world with modern kids without realizing modern kids do not actually live there.

That's fascinating to me, and it's also a lot of criticism for a movie I'm giving four stars because I really enjoyed it. Whatever reality this is supposed to exist in, I had a good time there.

If you like band movies, see Nimrods. This is a great addition to the genre.