That’s not to say he doesn’t have his moments – I’ll even go so far as to say that, with a little honing, he could become a charismatic screen presence – but as it stands, the musician just can’t hold the weight of an entire film on his (surprisingly frail!) shoulders.

The novelty of seeing freakin’ punk-rocker Billie Joe Armstrong play an everyman wears off, then becomes a humbling experience – watching the performer put himself out like that – and eventually turns aggravating, as the guy is clearly not up to the task. I’ll let you figure out how the rest turns out. Before things get rowdy, Perry’s domestic life comes barging in: locked-out in-laws, woodwork, getting bought out of the family business… In the meantime, Gary tears the hotel suite up, inviting a dozen people, ordering hundreds of dollars worth of room service and kicking Perry out of his own band. In a desperate attempt to reconnect with his rebellious youth, he tries to put together a party, but alas, only his borderline-psychotic friend Gary (Fred Armisen) shows up with a friend and a stripper. Until, that is, Jake lends him a grand, and Perry wisely decides to spend it on renting the Presidential Suite at the Drake Hotel.

“I watched ‘House Hunters’ and went to bed.” “House Hunters” comes up again later, as the ultimate embodiment of rock bottom. Cut to 20 years later: Perry is now a family man, working at Barry’s Hardware with his brother Jake (Chris Messina), forgetting to take out garbage cans, begging for a quickie from his wife Karen (Selma Blair), who (allegedly) forgot his 40th birthday… His daughter interrupts his jam-out trips down memory lane and scrutinizes him about his lack of a job his acquaintances call him a “pussy.” “My night was awesome,” Perry tells a friend. The film starts with black-and-white footage of the band performing in 1995, at the peak of their career. In a case of “art imitating life,” Bille Joe Armstrong plays an ex-rocker called Perry, his band resembling a somehow even more lo-fi Green Day. The actress is nowhere to be found in Kirk’s follow-up, the teeny-weeny more assured dramedy “Ordinary World.” Seems like the director left his sitcom roots behind and dove deep into granola indie filmmaking, Brian Baumgartner’s brief appearance serving as the only reminder of his television past.

He followed up with a feature-length directorial debut, the painfully contrived but earnest melodrama “The Giant Mechanical Man,” which Fischer starred in and produced. Lee Kirk presumably met his wife, actress Jenna Fischer, on the set of NBC’s acclaimed remake of the British sitcom “The Office.” Kirk briefly appeared as a character called Clark (and even directed an episode of the show). An aging punk rocker copes with life after rock.

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