Green Day's very blue 'Idiot'

The first thing you learn about American Idiot, the touring Green Day rock musical that opened Tuesday at the Merriam Theater, is that the show has more middle fingers and impolite words in five minutes than you'd get in five hours on South Street.

For the next 90 minutes, the it-sucks-to-be-young perspective roars out of about 40 video monitors, 20 thoroughly capable singing actors, and 21 articulate, mostly high-decibel songs authored by the band and performed in a plain, industrial basement full of junky couches.

In a cast headed by the charismatic Alex Nee, a slacker everyguy named Johnny narrates the show with diary-like entries that shape the sketchy plot. His buddy Tunny (Thomas Hettrick) goes off to war and loses a leg. Everybody oozes angst. We're told that the end of the world is over, an interesting but meaningless statement. Most bits utilize the childish rationalization that admitting faults excuses them.

Every generation has rebels without a cause, and this group takes pride in lacking one. During a love scene, Johnny and his girlfriend (Alyssa DiPalma) shoot up and perform an interpretive dance with the tourniquet. The show doesn't glamorize addiction but it makes redemption look easy-peasy, with no relapses, jails, or psych wards. A suicide is only vaguely alluded to.

Here is where the show's generational dividing line really lies. Those under 25 might connect with that world as a rite of passage. Those who know such dissolute lives outside stage and screen may take serious exception to the sound-bite treatment given to a panorama of human ruin.

Though American Idiot wouldn't exist without the precedent of Rent, it doesn't have a fraction of that show's heart and soul. Or musical variety. But the Michael Mayer-directed production is tightly paced, with aerobic-style choreography, and has one alluringly theatrical moment: The wounded soldier's romantic fantasy becomes an aerial ballet, she descending from the flies and he rising from his bed. Everything else stays down and very dirty.

Through Sunday at the Merriam Theater, 250 S. Broad St. Tickets: $20-$100. Information: 215-893-1999 or www.kimmelcenter.orgEndText