Two 80s teen dramas, The Breakfast Club and St Elmo’s Fire, made overnight stars of a band of young actors including Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore and Rob Lowe – and Andrew McCarthy, whose new documentary looks back on those years
Depending on your age, Andrew McCarthy’s Brats (Disney+, from 5 July) will either be a cosy nostalgia trip or a window into another era of celebrity. As someone who was two years old at their zenith, I’ve only ever known the Brat Pack as a past buzzword: a gaggle of then-young American actors who became a collective cultural phenomenon before just as quickly dispersing into a very different array of career fortunes. To look back on that now, as McCarthy’s documentary does, is to learn more about 80s-era media and publicity machinery than anything particularly crucial about American cinema.
The Brat Pack was defined in 1985 by a pair of coming-of-age films, The Breakfast Club and St Elmo’s Fire — one about high-schoolers, one about college grads, though made months apart with heavily overlapping casts. Neither has aged especially well except as a time capsule: the former is at least distinguished by the signature snarky snap of John Hughes’s writing and the fizzy pulse of Simple Minds’ Don’t You (Forget About Me), but the wispy soap opera of St Elmo’s Fire (complete with John Parr’s uncool title song) really has only the eager charisma of its ensemble to recommend it today.
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