9/10
I started watching The Breakfast Club because I was flipping channels and stopped to figure out what was happening on screen. I was fascinated. Five teenagers in a high school library. A petty principal patrolling the halls. A wise janitor. No location changes. Almost no plot. Long stretches of dialogue. The film should not have held me. It held me for the full runtime on first viewing and has held me for the five viewings since. This is not the kind of film I would normally pick. It is the kind of film I keep coming back to anyway.
The 9 reflects what six viewings have confirmed: the film is good from start to finish, the pacing is not fast but the pacing is correct, every scene earns its place, the four leads are excellent, the principal is a great antagonist, and the janitor is a great side character. The film is held back from a higher rating by a few specific late-act choices that I will get to. The 9 is honest. The film is one of the best teen dramas ever made and one of the most economically constructed films of the 1980s.
The Setup
It is a Saturday morning at Shermer High School in suburban Chicago. Five students have been assigned to serve detention from 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. for separate infractions. The assistant principal, Richard Vernon, gives them a thousand-word essay to write describing who they think they are. The students are Andrew Clark, the wrestling-team athlete; Brian Johnson, the academic; John Bender, the criminal; Claire Standish, the popular princess; and Allison Reynolds, the quiet weirdo. They are from different social castes within the school and have nothing in common except that they have to sit in the same library for the same nine hours.
That is the entire premise. Five kids. One library. One day. No outside action. No subplot. No second location. The film commits to its constraints and earns everything that happens through dialogue and small physical business. By the end of the day, the five students have shared their secrets, discovered they have more in common than they assumed, and become temporary friends. Brian writes the essay on behalf of all of them. The essay is the closing voiceover. The film ends as it began: five kids in a library, with the audience now knowing who they actually are.
For Writers
The Breakfast Club is the masterclass of the bottle-episode structure applied to a feature film. The constraints are absolute: one location, one day, one cast of five plus two supporting adults. The film cannot leave the building. The film cannot cut to a flashback. The film cannot introduce a new character. Every dramatic move must happen within the room with the people who started the day in it. The discipline this requires is unusual at feature length. Most films that try the bottle approach (Twelve Angry Men, Reservoir Dogs, Tape, Glengarry Glen Ross) keep the format compressed to a tighter runtime or use the constraint to amplify pre-existing tensions. The Breakfast Club starts with five strangers who have nothing in common. The film has to build every relationship from zero within the constraints. The lesson for writers is that constraints can be productive rather than limiting. Limiting your characters to one location, one day, and one cast forces every scene to do character work because there are no setpieces to fall back on. If your story is sagging, consider whether a temporary bottle constraint would force you to write dialogue and behavior rather than plot mechanics. The plot of The Breakfast Club, told as a paragraph, is almost nothing. The film is two hours long. The runtime is filled entirely with the kind of character work most films skip. The result is one of the most memorable American films of the 1980s.
The Five Leads
Emilio Estevez plays Andrew Clark, the wrestling-team athlete. The performance is the most generous of the five. Andrew could have been a one-note jock. Estevez plays him as a kid who is exhausted by the role his father has forced on him. The monologue about taping a kid’s buttocks together in the locker room is the film’s most emotionally exposed moment from a male character, and Estevez delivers it without sentiment. Andrew is in detention because he bullied another student and is ashamed of himself. The shame is the engine of his arc.
Anthony Michael Hall plays Brian Johnson, the academic. Hall was sixteen when this film shot and had already worked with John Hughes on Sixteen Candles. Brian is the smartest kid in the room and the kid least equipped to handle the emotional weather of the room. He is also the kid who finally articulates what the day has been about, in the closing essay that he writes on behalf of all five. The performance is generous in a different way than Estevez’s. Hall plays Brian as a kid who knows he is fragile and is trying to figure out how to be braver than he feels.
Judd Nelson plays John Bender, the criminal. The performance is the engine of the film’s antagonism. Bender is the loudest, the cruelest, the most physically aggressive, and the most clearly damaged. Nelson plays him as a kid who has decided that being feared is preferable to being pitied. The monologue about his father, where Bender mimics his father’s voice abusing him at home, is the film’s most quietly horrifying moment. The monologue lands because Nelson commits to it without trying to redeem the character. Bender is not asking for sympathy. Bender is showing the others what he knows about home and daring them to keep judging him.
Molly Ringwald plays Claire Standish, the popular princess. Ringwald was sixteen and had broken out with Sixteen Candles the year before. Claire could have been the easy villain of the ensemble: rich, pretty, socially powerful, dismissive of the others. The script and the performance refuse the easy version. Claire is unhappy in specific ways that Ringwald makes visible. Her parents are divorcing. Her social position is suffocating her. She is in detention for skipping class to go shopping. The film does not pretend Claire’s problems are equivalent to Bender’s, but the film also does not let Claire be reduced to her social position. Ringwald plays her as a kid who is starting to figure out that the role she has been handed is not going to fit her for much longer.
Ally Sheedy plays Allison Reynolds, the basket case. The performance is the film’s secret centerpiece. Allison spends the first half of the film almost silent, watching the others, occasionally interjecting with statements that may or may not be true. She lies compulsively. She eats a sandwich she has constructed out of Cap’n Crunch and Pixy Stix. She sketches obsessively. She is in detention because she had nothing else to do and showed up because being in detention was better than being at home. Sheedy plays the loneliness as something the character has built infrastructure around. Allison knows she is alone. She has accepted being alone. The acceptance is what makes her sad, and Sheedy understands that acceptance is harder to play than rebellion.
The five characters could have been a checklist. The script and the performances refuse the checklist. Each character is recognizable as a type and is also a specific person inside the type. The combination is what makes the film durable. The types let the audience orient quickly. The specificities let the audience invest. By the time the five have shared their secrets, the audience knows each of them well enough to feel the weight of every decision they make about each other.
For Writers
The Breakfast Club is the textbook example of how to use archetypes without being reduced to them. The five characters are introduced as types: the athlete, the brain, the criminal, the princess, the basket case. The types are the entry point. The film then spends two hours systematically complicating each type without abandoning it. Andrew is still an athlete at the end. He is also a kid whose father is grinding him into a person he does not want to be. Claire is still a princess at the end. She is also a kid whose social position has become a trap. The trick is that the type and the specificity coexist. The film does not pretend the types are wrong. The film also does not let the types be the whole story. If you are writing characters who function as archetypes within a story, resist the temptation to either deny the archetype (which feels false) or surrender to it (which feels lazy). Hold both at once. The character is a type. The character is also more than the type. Both things are true. The Breakfast Club holds both for five characters across two hours of runtime, which is the harder version of the lesson. Most writers can hold both for one character. Hughes holds both for five simultaneously and the film is great because of it.
Principal Vernon As Antagonist
Paul Gleason plays Richard Vernon, the assistant principal who has drawn the Saturday detention shift. The performance is one of the great supporting villain turns of 1980s cinema. Vernon is not a serious threat in the way a thriller villain would be. He is a petty bureaucratic cruelty machine. He treats the students as inmates. He treats the Saturday assignment as a power exercise. He makes deals with himself about what he can get away with when no other adults are watching. He is the kind of authority figure every kid has met and every adult has eventually become if they were not careful.
The performance is funny first and ominous second, which is the right order. Gleason plays Vernon with the full register of comedic timing, which is the same register Gleason brought to Deputy Chief Robinson in Die Hard three years later. The mid-1980s was Gleason’s peak comic-antagonist period and The Breakfast Club is the apex performance of that period. The “bathroom confrontation” scene with Bender, where Vernon tries to intimidate a student into respecting him and is rebuffed by Bender’s complete refusal to engage, is one of the most uncomfortably funny scenes in any teen film. The “boiler room” scene with Carl, where Vernon drops his professional pretense and admits he is scared of the kids who used to respect him, is the film’s most quietly devastating moment from an adult character.
Vernon works as an antagonist because the film treats his pettiness as both comic and serious at the same time. The audience can laugh at him and recognize him as a real threat to these specific kids on this specific day. The recognition is what makes the laughs uncomfortable. Most teen films would write Vernon as either pure comic foil or pure villain. The film writes him as both, which is the harder version, and Gleason executes both registers simultaneously.
Carl The Janitor
John Kapelos plays Carl Reed, the school janitor. The character is the film’s secret moral center and the side character who brings the entire teacher-administrator power structure down to size. Carl was Shermer High School’s Student of the Year in 1969. He is now mopping floors at the school he once attended. He has no illusions about the place. He has no illusions about Vernon. He has no illusions about the kids in detention. His clear-eyed appraisal of the entire institution is the film’s most adult perspective, delivered by the lowest-status adult in the building.
The scene in the boiler room where Vernon tries to confide in Carl about being scared of the kids is the film’s quietest masterpiece. Carl listens. Carl waits. Carl then asks Vernon for fifty dollars in exchange for not telling anyone what Vernon just said. The scene is funny on the surface and dismantling underneath. Vernon thought he was sharing a vulnerable moment with a peer. Carl was hearing a confession he could use. The transaction strips Vernon of any moral authority he might have left, and Carl walks away with cash and dignity. The character is the corrective the film needs. Without Carl, Vernon would have no opposition from another adult. With Carl, Vernon’s pettiness is exposed by someone with the social position to see it clearly and the personal experience to know exactly what it costs the kids in the library.
For Writers
Carl is the textbook example of how to use a low-status character to undermine a high-status antagonist. The structure works because Carl has nothing to lose and Vernon has everything to protect. Vernon’s authority depends on his official position. Carl’s authority depends on his personal observation of how the institution actually works. When the two characters share a scene, the official authority means nothing because Carl is not impressed by it and Vernon cannot fall back on it when challenged. The lesson is that antagonists with institutional power can be deflated most efficiently by characters with no institutional power and no investment in pretending the institution is more than it is. If your antagonist has a position of authority your protagonist cannot directly challenge, consider whether a low-status third character could see through the antagonist in a way your protagonist cannot. The low-status character is harder to write than the protagonist because they need a specific kind of observational competence that the protagonist does not need to have. Carl observes everything. He says little. When he says something, it lands because he has earned the right to land it. He is the film’s secret weapon and one of the most efficient supporting-character constructions in 1980s American cinema.
The Confession Circle
The structural midpoint of the film is the scene in which the five students sit together on the carpet of the library and tell each other why they are in detention. The scene is twenty minutes long and is essentially five monologues delivered in sequence. Brian admits he was caught with a flare gun and was contemplating using it on himself because he failed a class. Andrew admits he taped a smaller kid’s buttocks together in the locker room because his father pressured him to be a winner. Allison admits she has nothing wrong with her except chronic loneliness and a habit of lying for attention. Claire admits she has nothing wrong with her except suffocating social pressure and parents who use her as a weapon against each other. Bender does not get a clean confession scene because Bender has been confessing the whole day in different forms, but his earlier monologue mimicking his father is the equivalent.
The scene is the film’s emotional climax. The audience has been waiting for this. The film has been waiting for this. The five kids have been waiting for this all day. When the confessions come, they land because every prior scene has been building toward the possibility of these specific revelations. The film earns the scene by spending an hour and a half on the social positioning, the small humiliations, the petty victories, and the gradual lowering of guard. By the time the kids are willing to talk, the audience has been trained in the specific cost of each kid talking, and the talking matters because the cost has been established.
Allison’s Transformation
In the third act, Claire gives Allison a makeover. Allison emerges from the makeover with a different hairstyle, lighter makeup, and a different outfit. She is no longer the unkempt basket case. She is recognizably attractive in a conventional way. Andrew, who has spent the day mostly ignoring her, suddenly notices her. The two end up romantically paired by the time the day is over.
The scene is the film’s most controversial choice and is one of the reasons the rating is a 9 instead of higher. The film spent two hours building Allison as a specific kind of fascinating outsider whose loneliness was her own and whose strangeness was integral to who she was. The makeover scene flattens her into the conventional attractive partner. The argument the film implicitly makes is that Allison was hiding behind her appearance and the makeover lets her real self emerge. The audience can also read the scene as the film betraying its own thesis by suggesting that Allison’s value was conditional on her becoming conventionally attractive. Both readings are valid. Ally Sheedy has discussed the scene in interviews with some ambivalence. The film does not seem to know exactly what it wants the scene to mean.
The Allison transformation is the one beat that does not quite land. Everything else in the film earns its place. This one is the closest thing to a misstep, and the misstep is in the script rather than the performance. Sheedy plays the transformation as well as anyone could have. The conception of the scene is what makes it uneven.
The Personal Connection
I have watched this film six times. I have related most closely to Allison, with the obvious caveat that the connection has limits. My version of her isolation was different. My particular wiring is different. But the way Sheedy plays the loneliness, the watching, the protective lying, the eating of strange food alone in the corner of a room: those specifics register at the recognition level even when the scale of the loneliness is different. The film is one of the few in 1980s American cinema that treats the quiet outsider as a character with interiority rather than as the protagonist’s quirky friend or the protagonist’s love interest. Allison gets to be a person whose loneliness is her own and whose attention is worth following. The film could have written her as the basket case the title card calls her. The film instead wrote her as a person who has been mislabeled by her social position. That distinction is what makes the character durable and what makes the film personal for viewers who have ever been mislabeled themselves.
Craft: John Hughes As Writer-Director Auteur
Craft Note
John Hughes wrote and directed The Breakfast Club, his second film as director after Sixteen Candles in 1984. The period from 1984 to 1987 was the most concentrated good run of teen filmmaking from one creator in American cinema. Sixteen Candles in 1984. The Breakfast Club in 1985. Weird Science in 1985. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in 1986. Pretty in Pink (written, not directed) in 1986. Some Kind of Wonderful (written, not directed) in 1987. Six films in four years that defined the cultural understanding of suburban Chicago teenagers and that shaped the teen-film genre for the next four decades. The Breakfast Club is the centerpiece of this run because it is the most stripped-down. Hughes does not have a romantic subplot to fall back on the way Sixteen Candles did. He does not have a science-fiction premise the way Weird Science did. He does not have a wish-fulfillment day-off structure the way Ferris Bueller did. He has five kids in a library for one day. The constraint forces him to do the work his more high-concept films could occasionally avoid. The writing is tighter. The character work is deeper. The film is more emotionally serious than any of the others in the run. Hughes also chose to shoot the film almost entirely in sequence, which is rare in studio filmmaking. The cast lived the day with their characters and the performances accumulated emotional weight in real time. The opening dance sequence and the closing essay narration were shot at the actual end of production, which means the cast’s chemistry by those scenes was earned through the actual experience of having spent the production together. The craft choice is the kind of decision that distinguishes auteur filmmaking from competent filmmaking. Hughes was making decisions about how to shoot the film that served the specific emotional content of the film rather than the standard efficiencies of studio production. The 9 rating reflects what those choices produced. The film is one of the most emotionally precise American films of its decade and Hughes is the reason. See also Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) review for the related craft analysis of Amy Heckerling, who made a different kind of teen film in a different register three years earlier and helped establish the genre Hughes would dominate.
The Verdict
A 9. The Breakfast Club is one of the best teen films ever made and one of the most economically constructed films of the 1980s. The bottle-episode structure is executed with discipline. The five leads are excellent. Paul Gleason is one of the great comic-antagonist supporting performances. John Kapelos as Carl is the film’s secret moral compass. The script does the harder version of every choice. The film holds at 9 because the Allison transformation scene is the closest thing to a misstep in two hours of otherwise precise filmmaking.
I have watched it six times. I will watch it again. The film does not get faster on rewatch. The film also does not get less. Every viewing reveals another piece of business I missed before. A specific glance Sheedy gives during the confession circle. A line reading from Gleason in the bathroom scene I had not registered. The way Kapelos delivers the “fifty dollars” line. The film is dense enough to reward attention indefinitely.
See also: Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) review. The two films are bookends of the early-to-mid 1980s American teen-film renaissance and work as a pair.
FAQ
How does The Breakfast Club compare to Fast Times at Ridgemont High?
The two films are bookends of the early-to-mid 1980s American teen-film renaissance. Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) established that an American teen film could treat its characters as recognizable people with real lives, sexual experiences, and economic pressures. The Breakfast Club (1985) demonstrated that the same level of honesty could be sustained inside a bottle-episode structure with five characters in one room. Both films land at 9 on my rating. They work as a pair. See the Fast Times review for the companion piece.
Is Principal Vernon really an antagonist?
Yes, but not in the thriller sense. Vernon is a petty bureaucratic cruelty machine. He does not threaten anyone’s life. He threatens their dignity, their permanent records, and their sense of being seen as people rather than as problems. The character works as an antagonist because the film treats his pettiness as both comic and serious. The audience laughs at him while also recognizing him as a real threat to these specific kids on this specific day. Paul Gleason’s performance gives the character the comic timing and the underlying weight to function in both registers simultaneously.
Who wrote and directed the film?
John Hughes wrote and directed. The Breakfast Club was his second film as director after Sixteen Candles in 1984. Hughes wrote the original script in two days and then spent several months refining it before production. The script went through multiple drafts but kept the central bottle-episode structure throughout. Hughes considered The Breakfast Club his most personal film and has discussed it in interviews as the project that established his approach to teen filmmaking.
Who is in the Brat Pack?
The term “Brat Pack” was coined by a 1985 New York magazine article about the young actors who were dominating teen-oriented films of the era. The core members are usually considered to be Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, and Ally Sheedy, with additional names sometimes added depending on the list. Five of the seven core members appeared in The Breakfast Club (Estevez, Hall, Nelson, Ringwald, Sheedy), which is one of the reasons the film is considered the Brat Pack’s defining feature. The term was generally disliked by the actors it described, who felt it diminished their individual careers and lumped them into a marketing category.
Was the film shot in sequence?
Yes, mostly. John Hughes chose to shoot the film almost entirely in chronological order, which is rare in studio production. The cast lived through the day in real time with their characters. The decision allowed the performances to accumulate emotional weight as production proceeded. The opening dance sequence and the closing essay narration were shot near the end of production, which means the cast’s chemistry by those scenes was earned through the actual experience of having spent the production together. The choice is one of the reasons the film feels emotionally cohesive in ways most ensemble films do not.
What is the Allison makeover scene about?
It is the film’s most controversial choice. Claire gives Allison a makeover in the third act that transforms her from the unkempt basket case into a conventionally attractive young woman. Andrew, who had been mostly ignoring her, suddenly notices her. The two end up romantically paired. Some viewers see the scene as Allison finally allowing her real self to emerge. Other viewers see it as the film betraying its own thesis by suggesting Allison’s value was conditional on conventional attractiveness. Both readings are valid. The scene is the one beat in the film that does not quite land cleanly. Ally Sheedy has discussed it in subsequent interviews with some ambivalence about the choice.
Is the “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” song original to the film?
Yes, in the sense that it was written and recorded for the film. The song was composed by Keith Forsey and Steve Schiff and offered first to Bryan Ferry, Billy Idol, and several other artists who all declined. Simple Minds, a Scottish rock band, accepted reluctantly and recorded the song in three hours. The song became the band’s only U.S. number-one hit and one of the defining songs of the 1980s, despite the band’s own ambivalence about it. The song’s placement over the film’s closing image is one of the most efficient marriages of song and image in 1980s teen cinema.
How does Carl the janitor function in the story?
Carl is the film’s moral foil to Vernon and the side character who brings the institutional authority structure back down to size. He has the lowest official status of any adult in the building (he was Student of the Year in 1969 and is now mopping floors at the same school) and the highest functional authority because nothing about the place impresses him. His scene in the boiler room with Vernon, where he extracts fifty dollars in exchange for not telling anyone what Vernon just confessed, is the film’s most efficient use of a supporting character to dismantle an antagonist. John Kapelos plays Carl with the kind of accumulated weariness that makes the character feel like he has been watching this school for thirty years.
Why does the film still hold up?
Because the bottle-episode structure does not date the way location-and-action structures do. The film could be remade today with the same five archetypes in the same library and the structure would still work. The specific cultural references (the music, the fashion, the slang) are 1985-specific, but the underlying social positions (jock, brain, criminal, princess, outsider) are still recognizable categories in any contemporary high school. The film also handles emotional honesty in ways that most teen films before and since have flinched from. The combination of structural durability and emotional honesty is why the film keeps finding new audiences. New viewers in their teens watching The Breakfast Club for the first time today are having the same recognition responses that viewers in 1985 had. The recognition is what makes the film immortal.