Name: Nimrods
Director: Lee Kirk
Genre: Comedy, Music, Drama
Released: 2026-08-14T00:00:00+00:00
Cast: Mason Thames, Mckenna Grace, Jenna Fischer, Angela Kinsey, Sean Gunn

The van is the first thing Nimrods asks you to believe in: a rust-flecked box pointed west out of Kansas City, its windows fogged with cheap heat, the flat gold light of the Plains dissolving into the neon smear of the coast. Riding inside are three friends who have decided, on the strength of a phone call none of them entirely heard, that their scrappy band is booked to open for Green Day on New Year’s Eve.

The whole film lives in that gap, the one between what the boys are certain is waiting in Los Angeles and whatever is actually there. Writer-director Lee Kirk treats their delusion with exactly the gravity they bring to it, then hands them a highway and lets the miles do the arguing. The joke was never that they are wrong. It is how far they will drive, and how much they will wreck, before any of them says so out loud.

Mason Thames plays the true believer at the center of the van, and the casting is the movie’s clearest statement of intent. Thames carries earnestness without winking at it: the film needs a lead who can sell a bad idea as a calling and stay sympathetic while the plan comes apart around him. Mckenna Grace is the ballast, the one voice with enough skepticism to see the cliff coming and not quite enough leverage to turn the wheel. The pairing frames the comedy as something with real stakes under the mischief, kids betting everything on a booking that may be nothing more than a misunderstanding.

Kirk has spent his career in this register, small and humane comedies about people whose reach runs well past their circumstances. His feature debut paired a lonely street performer with Jenna Fischer; a later film handed Billie Joe Armstrong the role of an aging punk trying to buy back his old life, which makes Nimrods the second time Kirk has pointed a camera at the Green Day frontman. That history matters, because the band-worship at the film’s core comes from a director who has already sat across from the man on the poster and knows the difference between a myth and the person inside it.

Visually the film leans into the iconography of the American road picture, diner light and motel signage and the endless ribbon of interstate, then tips it toward the scrappy, sticker-plastered aesthetic of pop-punk, all Sharpie set lists and thrift-store leather. It is a look that flatters the delusion: the world outside the windshield keeps promising that a band this broke could still be one exit away from the big time.

Green Day did not lend their name and step back. Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tre Cool produced the film, and the story mines their own pre-fame history, the years spent rattling around in a van chasing gigs before Dookie turned them into stadium property. That is the engine and the risk in one motion: the band is not merely a plot device the kids chase but the production’s own origin story, retold with affection by the people who actually lived it.

Whether that affection stays honest is the open question. Road comedies built on a single delusion have to keep the delusion charming for ninety-odd minutes, or the one joke curdles into a slog; a movie produced by its own idols risks sliding from comedy into commercial, a feature-length victory lap for a band that does not need one. Nothing in the premise guarantees Kirk keeps the film about the kids rather than the logos on their T-shirts. The trailer promises mischief and a great deal of Green Day; it does not yet prove the movie has anything to say about why boys build a whole identity around a band in the first place.

Mason Thames in the Green Day road comedy Nimrods directed by Lee Kirk — Mason Thames in the Lee Kirk comedy Nimrods (2026)

The ensemble around Thames and Grace is deep for a road comedy. Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey, reunited from the sitcom that made them both and each tied to Kirk off screen, anchor the adult world, with Sean Gunn, Bobby Lee and Fred Armisen filling out the gallery of oddballs the van collects along the way. Kylr Coffman and Ryan Foust round out the band as the two friends strapped in beside Thames for the ride. Kirk works from his own script, and the film reaches theaters through Inaugural Entertainment, in a new partnership with the fan-owned studio Legion M, with Live Nation Studios among the producers.

Nimrods first played festivals under the title New Years Rev, premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival before Inaugural Entertainment acquired it and gave it the punchier, Green-Day-coded name it now carries. The R-rated comedy opens in US theaters on August 14, 2026. No theatrical dates have been confirmed for other markets at the time of writing.