Last year, on a whim, I rented the film, Broadway Idiot. Â I thought I was going to see a film about translating a product from an audio medium into a audio-visual medium. How could you give a story structure to something as abstract as Green Days’ American Idiot? I expected this to be a behind the scenes documentary, with a lot of information, but little drama. I was pretty wrong about that.
Broadway Idiot is a documentary that is advertised as telling the story of how Green Day’s American Idiot got to broadway. But its more than that. The documentary is really more about how Billie Joe Armstrong, a rock star who, out of necessity isolated himself from all but a few people, found a love for theatre through the development of the play, and found a family and a connection with the cast that can only exist in the theatre.
I highly recommend the film for any who loves theatre. Watching Billie Joe let his guard down over time was really something to see, and watching someone discover the power of theatre was something even better.