Film Reviews: Fans of Green Day Will Enjoy “Nimrods,” a Road Trip Love Letter to Punk Rock, While in “The Last House” a Family Only Has Each Other as the World Ends

Nimrods (c) Inaugural Entertainment

Film: Nimrods 
In Cinemas 

Up-and-coming actor Mason Thames has fought dragons (and then befriended them) in How to Train Your Dragon and a serial killer in Black Phone, but his biggest challenge in his young film career has to be portraying a teen believing that Green Day wants his band, Analog Dogs, to play a concert with them, on New Year’s Eve in Nimrods. It seems in the world of the film that it’s a given that this teen would believe this crazy offer, so how much you go with it will determine your enjoyment of this fun hangout. The hurdles for Tommy (Thames) to overcome are that he’s underage (his mom, played by Jenna Fischer, expressly forbids it) and he also doesn’t have any way to get to California from Missouri with less than $30 to his name. His bandmates are his high-school best friend, bassist Chad (Kylr Coffman), and his high school “can barely stand him but he can play the drums” Fred (Ryan Foust). Their road trip starts with a stolen car and an emergency-only credit card, and from there we get run-ins with all kinds of characters, including a kindly bar owner (Angela Kinsey), a fellow aspiring singer (McKenna Grace) and a very (very!) strange motel owner (Fred Arminsen). But this is all played with a healthy dose of can-do attitude and a smart screenplay by Lee Kirk (with a story assist by the Green Day band members themselves: Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool) so even though every plot point can be predicted a mile away, it is still an enjoyable ride. Thames is a cool but clueless everyman with an impossible dream while the goofy Coffman and self-serious Foust give ample comedy support in a Superbad kinda way. There’s also Keen Ruffalo, son of Mark, as Tommy’s older brother Wayne, who instigates the whole plot and has a nice emotional moment at the end of the film. To say that Green Day does show up is barely a spoiler, but the concert scenes add a satisfying romp for fans of the band, road-trip movies and those American Idiots who refuse to give up on their dreams. 

Theater Review: Thirty-Years Later, in a Bizarro Political Landscape, This “American Daughter” Revival Is Strangely Nostalgic; A Footballer Play Needs Less Banter and More “Pass”-ing; Cat Cohen’s “Broad Strokes” Has Funny Thoughts, As Almost-Death Becomes Her

An American Daughter (c) Joan Marcus

Theater: An American Daughter 
At The Pershing Square Signature Center 

The downside of having a QR Code instead of a Playbill is that essential information is now not readily accessible to theatergoers. For the first New York revival of Wendy Wasserstein’s An American Daughter, which premiered on Broadway in the 1997 with the great Kate Nelligan in the title role, I was wondering if director Sarna Lapine would update the play to modern day MAGA or keep it in the 90s where the biggest scandal was Nannygate, in which President Bill Clinton had to withdraw two female nominees for attorney general because one didn’t pay social security tax for her nanny and the other had hired an illegal alien for hers. Even though set designer Mikiko Suzuki MacAdams’ upscale Georgetown living room is gorgeous, its timeless design doesn’t give us any clues. The first clue actually comes from the radio that’s playing Ringo Starr’s version of “You’re Sixteen,” a now looked down-upon song about a man professing his love for an underaged girl, with Lyssa Dent Hughes (Jean Lichty) unironically singing along. We are definitely in 1997. Lyssa is the current nominee for surgeon general, where she hopes to promote women-specific health care. The two solid rocks in her life are her shaggy dog of a husband Walter (Robert Sean Leonard) and her best friend Judith (Montego Glover), who is not only a doctor, but one of the few black Jews at her synagogue. Then there are the young whippersnappers (who today would be political vlogger influencers) with typical Wasserstein Charles Dickens-type names: Quincy Quince (Carmen Zilles), a feminist essayist with aspirations of grandeur, and Timber Tucker (Chris Ghaffari), a political reporter doing a piece on Lyssa. They all end up at a brunch where the most unbelievable character of a play, Walter’s friend named (sigh!) Morrow McCarthy (Ryan Spahn), a conservative, pro-life, gay newspaper columnist willingly and with seeming malice, accuses Lyssa that she, using her busy upper-class life as an alibi, willingly ignored a jury summons. And what was just a throwaway conversation bon mot becomes the current news cycle’s hot gotcha moment that threatens to derail her nomination. 

Reviews: Teens Born With Empathy Try to Interpret Religion in “The Saviors” and Greek Mythology is On a Box Office Roll With “Hadestown: The Musical”

The Saviors (c) Ahron R. Foster

Theater: The Saviors 
At Atlantic Theater Company

The minute you walk into the Linda Gross Theater, it’s sort of a shock to see a realistic sanctuary of a church (courtesy of set designer David Zinn), since the theater used to be St. Peter’s Episcopal Church when it was built in 1854 with a huge crucifix towering over the audience, an altar in the center of the stage, a board with hymn numbers to be sung on the left and a door leading outside to the right. Thankfully, credit playwright Bubba Weiler for having most of the action of The Saviors happen on the sides and not the altar itself. Instead of focusing on the church itself, we watch the days in and days out of two altar boys after mass as they clean up and do their chores. Michael (Ivan Howe), the younger but more gregarious of the two, starts the play conflicted as to what his confirmation name should be. Paul (Julius Rinzel) doesn’t seem to have put much thought into his, so when Michael suggests they take each other’s name, it’s a clue to not only the faith of the best friends, but their relationship as well. Despite this Call Me By Your Name moment, the play is less about sexual awakening (although there is some) and more about religious faith. Paul, like a certain nun in a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, tries to explain to Michael that he has Doubts. This sort of rocks Michael’s world as he always assumed he and Paul would do everything together, including going to the nearby Catholic high school. But Paul doesn’t want to traverse the same path most of the people in this small town seem to be on and explore the outside world instead. 

Film Reviews: A Welcome Return of Gregg Araki and He “Wants Your Sex,” “Motor City” Is the Loudest and Most Violent Silent-ish Film, “The Odyssey” Is Another Christopher Nolan Portrait of a Man Angering the Gods and “Heartstopper Forever” Gives Charlie and Nick a Proper Gay Farewell

I Want Your Sex (c) Black Bear Pictures

Film: I Want Your Sex 
In Cinemas on July 31 

I didn’t know I missed director Gregg Araki’s unique voice and vision until I saw his first film in over 12 years, the quirky comedy, I Want Your Sex, which premiered at Sundance In January, with its only misstep being its risqué title - overkill if you know Araki’s filmography (Mysterious Skin, The Doom Generation). The film’s big surprise is actor Cooper Hoffman, who has done good work so far (The Long Walk, Saturday Night), but here he is really embracing the goofiness of his character, Elliot, a shaggy and aimless but easygoing guy who finds himself first as an intern to provocative visual artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde) and then as her sexual partner. Araki has brought something out of Hoffman, who has never let loose like he does here, pointing towards the kind of symbiotically rich relationship his father Philip Seymour Hoffman had with visionary directors like Todd Solondz and Charlie Kauffman. Wilde is also having a ball as an artist that uses sex as her muse (I Want Your Sex and her other movie from this year, The Invite, have interchangeable titles that still work for both). Where the movie goes from here is part of the fun, so I’ll just say that Elliot gets into some outrageous situations (some with and without dildos), with ample support from Charli XCX as his couldn’t-care-less girlfriend, Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville as police detectives, Mason Gooding as his gay co-worker and seemingly his only friend and Daveed Diggs as Erika’s first-in-command. The one thing I couldn’t really figure out is the point of all these sometimes wild and sometimes tasteless shenanigans, not that there always need to be one for a comedy, but a more cohesive commentary about sexual autonomy could have provided added structural foundation. But it’s perfectly fine with just Greg Araki’s playful doodles, stylishly bright palette and some enjoyably campy set-pieces. 

Theater Reviews: Two Buzzy Women-Driven Theater Projects Open: “The Whoopi Monologues” Celebrate Goldberg (The Playwright) and There’s Only Murders in Palermo in the Entertaining “Giulia”

The Whoopi Monologues (c) Angela Marie Orellana

Theater: The Whoopi Monologues 
At Lincoln Center Theatre 

Director Whitney White has reconceived the theatrical work of Whoopi Goldberg and turned it into an enjoyable event for five black actresses to explore the diverse characters Goldberg wrote for herself and see them in a new way. Four of The Whoopi Monologues are from the comedian’s 1984 show supervised by director Mike Nichols, and the fifth is from her 2004 revival. The start of the performances is a variation on how the HBO special of her 1984 hit began in which Whoopi goes to the dressing room of each of the characters she’s going to portray to wish them good luck. We meet the five actresses as they dance their way onto the stage before entering their respective dressing rooms, with the wonderful Kara Young (Purpose) in an oversized men’s suit, kicking things up with Fontaine, a truth-telling junkie who serendipitously is transported from the mean streaks of New York to Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam. Next up is Dominique Fishback (Judas and the Black Messiah) as a little black girl with a white shirt on her head because she doesn’t like her natural hair or her brown eye color. Danielle Pinnock (TV's Ghosts) in a fun blue wig is a Jamaican curios-stand owner who talks about being hired by a rich man she calls “the old raisin” and her adventures in America. Then it’s Kerry Washington (Scandal) playing a beach-loving valley girl (but really considers herself a surfer chick, if you don’t mind) who tells about a flirtation with a cute guy at a party and the aftermath. The final monologue focuses on Lureen (Hell’s Kitchen’s Kecia Lewis), an older black woman going through menopause, fanning herself from a hot flash she describes as “Dick Cheney at a gay wedding hot.”