Green Day's 'Nimrods' is a rowdy punk road movie. No phones, no parents, just chaos

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Set us as preferred Green Day’s new film, “Nimrods,” believes in the enduring power of a black leather battle jacket.In one poignant early scene, Jenna Fischer’s character pulls that well-worn garment out of a box to give to her teenage son Tommy, a young punk rocker about to hit the road to L.A.to open (he thinks) for Green Day at the Hollywood Palladium.

The kid chokes up.The jacket belonged to his late father, whom he remembers hovering over a record player, bearing songs from a more thrilling world.

He dons it like armor for the chaos to come.“There is that thing about the leather jacket, where it carries so much more weight because he’s a musician and his dad’s one too,” said Green Day’s singer Billie Joe Armstrong.“We see families coming to Green Day shows now — two, three generations.

It’s amazing to see a young person that’s 14 years old that gets into ‘Dookie’ for the very first time, a record that’s over 30 years old.You’re always trying to make music that you’re able to play in the future.

We were always kind of old souls in that way.”Green Day’s new feature film, written and directed with Lee Kirk, is an old-soul road trip movie.“Nimrods,” out Aug.

14 in theaters, is a smitten, profane yet often moving snapshot of a young band striking out on their own, drawn from Green Day’s gritty beginnings in the East Bay punk scene of the ‘80s and ‘90s.Music The veteran Bay Area punk trio brought its albums ‘Dookie’ and ‘American Idiot’ to Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium on Saturday night.In a time when teen life is subsumed by alienating digital technology and an understandable risk-aversion, “Nimrods” takes the yearnings of its young punks seriously.“You have to be delusional to be in a band,” Armstrong said.

“It takes a certain kind of dreamer.I remember trying to get that first gig.

It was like, ‘Oh, my God, if we could only get out of th...