Written and Directed by Andrew McCarthy | 92 min | ▲▲▲▲△ | Disney+
For you, kind reader, who may not be aware, I’m solidly in what Douglas Coupland named Generation X.
I was a teenager in the 1980s when Hollywood served up a number of movies starring a group of fetching young actors everyone called The Brat Pack. They seemed to work together pretty regularly in movies aimed at a younger audience. I knew full well at the time they didn’t like the tag. They bristled at the suggestion they were dilettantes.
But then we were all MTV kids. Compared to the Boomers, we were considered a shallower, more confused generation. When we got our own movie stars, someone decided to take them down a peg. Turns out it was a Boomer, 29-year-old David Blum, who wrote the New York magazine article that named the group — and he also appears here, unrepentant. (There’s a whole other documentary to be done about the demise of Gotcha Celebrity Journalism.)
“What was that need to create us?” asks writer-director and former Brat Pack member, Andrew McCarthy. It’s one of the few groan-worthy moments of his film, which is otherwise a fascinating exploration of his and others’ misspent youth. Brats documents his effort to reconnect with his former Packers — Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Demi Moore, Rob Lowe, and the Pack-adjacent, Jon Cryer and Lea Thompson — and make sense of their former lives as superstars.
The actors recall their moment in the celebrity spotlight and that’s weird and singular, but it’s not profound to audiences beyond nostalgia. That said, to witness these people with their shared history slightly bristle in the presence of the other — they didn’t all get along back in the day — that’s compelling viewing. Now in comfortable middle age, they wrestle with memories and associations.
It’s the films they made that are important — especially the ones by John Hughes — they still resonate for a lot of people, myself included, even as some haven’t aged too well.
When McCarthy says, “I don’t want to react to it anymore,” it’s hard to not have some sympathy for the guy.
Not everyone’s cracked up to be hugely perceived at a young age and have that be an inescapable part of one’s legacy, even if he and his cronies were a hugely privileged group of actors — thousands would’ve killed to be in their shoes. It’s clear from his film that others in his group did a lot better with the attention — Rob Lowe, for instance. No one’s ever been more comfortable with fame than that guy, it seems.
The part that works best with this trip into the past is when McCarthy asks for perspective from cultural commentators: Malcolm Gladwell, Suzannah Gora, Ira Madison III, and Bret Easton Ellis, amongst others.
They bring broader, valuable ideas about the ’80’s zeitgeist and what made the movies so resonant: How friendship between the characters were always on the forefront, how the music was an essential part of it, how audiences felt so invested in the stories, as well as how the growth of mall life and the ubiquity of the VCR played roles. Hughes is given a lot of credit for the phenomenon — while it’s also evident how white those casts were.
McCarthy manages to get a lot of insight from his former colleagues, but I was left with questions:
The absences of Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson (outside of archival footage) are explained, but what of key member Anthony Michael Hall? I would’ve also have liked to have heard from more stars in nearby galaxies — how did the Brat Pack label concern Mare Winningham (whose hair is visible in the publicity shot at the top of this page), Mary Stuart Masterson, James Spader, or John Cusack? Were their careers either propped up or diminished by the association?
Further, how much fun would it have been to get them all together for a dinner and conversation? Maybe McCarthy can assemble a sequel, though he may not need to: According to Deadline, a St Elmo’s Fire 2 is in the works.
