MTV's Green Day Makes a Video described "Holiday" as a party, and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" as the subsequent hangover.

[1] The single peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100, making it Green Day's most successful song in the United States.

[3] A punk rock concept album, American Idiot's narrative is focused on the story of a teenager (who refers to himself as the "Jesus of Suburbia") growing up in the United States under the presidency of George W. Bush during the Iraq War, criticizing both.

[8] The song is named after Boulevard of Broken Dreams, a painting by Gottfried Helnwein that depicts James Dean, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley together in a downtown diner, with the title reflecting their deaths.

[14] Lyrically, the song reflects the current state of the Jesus of Suburbia after leaving behind his loved ones and soon becoming lonely, facing uncertainty about his future.

[13] It is chronologically set one day after "Holiday", a song in which the Jesus of Suburbia initially celebrated his newfound freedom, though later became discontented.

According to Jordan Blum of PopMatters, some of the song's lyrics foreshadow the future of the Jesus of Suburbia, and suggested the protagonist's possible borderline personality disorder.

[13] The chorus reiterates his sense of isolation, stating that his shadow is the "only one that walks beside [him]", while also expressing a wish that "someone up there will find [him]", hoping to meet someone to overcome his loneliness, a theme that is resolved in later songs on the album.

[13] Lora Kelly of the New York Times described the song as a "low point" in the Jesus of Suburbia's story, and found the lyrics to resemble those of a theater performance.

[10] American Idiot was released on September 21, 2004; "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" is the fourth song on the standard track list.

Despite this, the song was overall more popular in Australia, finishing 2005 as the 31st best-selling single and earning a Platinum certification from the ARIA for sales exceeding 70,000 copies.

[citation needed] The award-winning music video for "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" was directed by Samuel Bayer.

The video depicts the band members after their car has stalled in the desert, and they begin a melancholy walk down a dusty road.

The car features a hood ornament in the shape of the hand and heart grenade image from the American Idiot album cover, which was also used in the video for "Holiday".

As shown in an MTV Making the Video special, Bayer used unorthodox techniques to achieve the aged film look of the "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" video, including using rear projection (as opposed to green screen) and physically damaging the negative: scratching the film with razor blades, pouring coffee on it, and smudging cigarettes on it.