Brats, review: Andrew McCarthy turns 1980s Brat Pack nostalgia into an angst-ridden ego trip

Watching Brats (Disney+) should be my dream assignment. Andrew McCarthy gets the Brat Pack back together! For someone who came of age in the 1980s and learned everything there is to know about teenagehood from John Hughes movies, this is thrilling stuff.

Pretty in Pink is my favourite film. I love St Elmo’s Fire despite almost everything about it being ludicrous. I could storyboard The Breakfast Club without missing a single scene. And while most of my friends were deeply in love with Rob Lowe, I considered myself (aged 13) to have more sophisticated tastes. My heart belonged to the shy, soulful McCarthy. Brats includes the Pretty in Pink clip of Blane (“His name is Blane? That’s a major appliance, that’s not a name…”) walking into the record shop and flashing Molly Ringwald that nervous smile. Swoon.

So it pains me greatly to say that McCarthy does not come across well in Brats. It’s 90 minutes of him complaining about being labelled a Brat Pack member, which he believes defined and damaged his career by suggesting that he was not a serious actor. Boy, has he held a grudge. One by one, he meets fellow Brat Packers – almost all of them after an absence of 30 years, because they did not stay friends – and needily tries to poke them into agreeing how miserable it made them too. Except it didn’t. Andrew, I say this with love: you’re 61. Get over it.

There is an archive clip of a young Demi Moore on the set of St Elmo’s Fire, saying that the actors were playing extensions of themselves. It turns out to be true. McCarthy played an angst-written writer who had a coffin for a coffee table and published an op-ed called The Meaning of Life; here he is now, making a tortured documentary in which he throws in Eugene O’Neill references and talks too fast, all to a soundtrack of Lou Reed.

Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson, the two actors that most people would like to hear from, declined to take part. When McCarthy tracks down the others, they all behave just as their characters would. Moore has put her boozing days behind her and achieved serenity through money, therapy and a very talented facialist (“Against-ness only provokes against-ness,” she says, gnomically). A jovial Lowe says of the Brat Pack days: “Fun, excitement – the world’s your oyster!” and coaxes McCarthy into admitting that having millions of fans and partying at Sammy Davis Jr’s house were pretty good times, all things considered.

While Lowe is generous, Emilio Estevez seems chippy and defensive, but this could just be because he doesn’t like his interviewer. Hilariously, he conducts the conversation over the kitchen counter, creating the impression that he didn’t invite McCarthy to sit down and hopes not to see him again for at least another 30 years.

The documentary is still a lovely hit of nostalgia, peppered with clips and interviews (Ally Sheedy is sweet, Jon Cryer is funny, Timothy Hutton talks about bees) and includes insights from various contributors as to why the films were so potent. Writer Bret Easton Ellis makes the point that seeing a film in those days required making the trip to the cinema, queuing for a ticket and really taking it in: “You were investing in something. It wasn’t just flipping on Spotify or watching a movie over four nights on Netflix.” And it was an era in which films for teenagers took off, after decades of cinema aimed at older audiences.

The denouement sees McCarthy confront David Blum, the journalist who coined the “Brat Pack” term in an unnecessarily mean-spirited article for New York Magazine in 1985. He seems as baffled as the rest of us as to why McCarthy remains so irked about it. And if you find that article – the contents of which McCarthy doesn’t show us – you will see that he included Tom Cruise and Sean Penn as Brat Pack members (for Taps/Risky Business and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, respectively), both of whom went on to do all right for themselves. It also makes precisely one mention of Andrew McCarthy, right at the end, placing him outside the Brat Pack and quoting an unnamed co-star in St Elmo’s Fire as saying: “He plays all his roles with too much intensity. I don’t think he’ll make it.” Which was also a mean thing to say. But McCarthy sure is intense.

Brats is available on Disney+ from Friday 5 July