Empathic and Honest; a Classic Teen Discovery Piece

Rating: 9/10 (12 July 2016)

The most timeless film of the Hughes / Ringwald / Brat Pack era, and clearly the most serious, personal work of the director's career. The Breakfast Club is an up-close, introspective look at five essentially disparate souls who share one cramped Saturday together in detention and, along the way, discover there's much more to their peers than what they wear and who they hang with. Reminiscent of theater, much like the closed-room classic 12 Angry Men, this isn't a flashy picture but it really doesn't need to be. This film rides entirely on the strength of its authentic, revealing dialog and the astonishingly mature, resounding performances of its cast, who contribute many of the sharpest, most memorable lines via ad-lib. It's about trust (or lack thereof), pushing others' buttons, being honest with oneself, testing new boundaries and revealing a shared, deep-seated uneasiness about the perilous approach of adulthood and its inherent responsibilities. Emotions run high at this age, and they respect no class distinctions. The cast may be extremely small, but it delivers across the board; Judd Nelson's damaged loner, Ally Sheedy's bashful antisocial, Anthony Michael Hall's over-stressed bookworm, Emilio Estevez's high-strung jock, Molly Ringwald's pretentious priss. Each role a potential career-maker, and not a missed note in the bunch. It's an existential essential, a notice to uncertain adolescents that somebody understands, and a reminder to their grown-up counterparts that they, too, were once just as troubled.