In the mid-1980s, Andrew McCarthy starred in a number of highly successful teen films. You’ve probably heard of at least two of them: St. Elmo’s Fire and Pretty in Pink. He and several other young actors were positioned at exactly the right time and place to create a cultural moment. Teen stories were smart, popular, honest, and fun in ways they hadn’t been before, and this whole group of actors were starring in most of them. This young cadre of performers, including McCarthy, Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Anthony Michael Hall, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, and Ally Sheedy, seemed poised to take over Hollywood.
In 1985, journalist David Blum penned an article for New York Magazine titled “Hollywood’s Brat Pack They’re Rob, Emilio, Sean, Tom, Judd, and the rest—the young movie stars you can’t quite keep straight.” Starting out as a feature on Estevez, it morphed into a piece on the culture of this group of performers and ended up changing the trajectory of nearly all of their careers. Through the early 1990s, the term Brat Pack was everywhere, and none of the young actors seemed to enjoy it. While only briefly mentioned in the article, Andrew McCarthy’s performance in St. Elmo’s Fire cements him as a member of the group, and Brats is his attempt to engage with and perhaps find some closure with that era in his career.
Link: https://movieswetextedabout.com/brats-documentary-review-andrew-mccarthy-looks-for-closure/
Tribeca 2024: ‘Brats’: Andrew McCarthy Looks for Closure | Movies We Texted About
