The characters-Nelson’s volatile, tortured young hoodlum, Bender, and Ringwald’s shallow popular girl, Claire-seem frozen in time, trapped in detention hall as surely as the iconic teen of an earlier generation-James Dean’s Jim Stark in the 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause-will forever be racing in a stolen car toward the edge of a cliff, in search of a r aison d ‘ être.ĭirector John Hughes, who died suddenly of a heart attack last year at 59, wanted it that way. Even “Don’t You Forget About Me,” the movie’s rousing theme song, actually was co-written by a boomer named Keith Forsey (born in 1948) and performed by a Scottish band, Simple Minds, whose core members were born in 19. Though it was set in the mid-1980s, The Breakfast Club always seemed as if it could just as easily have occurred 10 years earlier, during my own high school years. The film featured an ensemble of actors who, like Nelson, either were boomers (Estevez and Sheedy were born in 1962) or on the cusp (Ringwald and Hall in 1968). The movie that’s long been celebrated as one of the seminal examinations of the trials, tribulations and joys of Generation X was directed by a baby boomer, Hughes, who based it on his observations of his neighbors’ teenage children in the early 1970s, according to David Kamp’s excellent March 2010 article on Hughes in Vanity Fair. That brings home one of the odd ironies about The Breakfast Club. Ringwald has morphed from waifish ingenue to mother of three and self-help book author (her recent book, Getting the Pretty Back: Friendship, Family and Finding the Perfect Lipstick, is about self-actualization after 40). Those formerly fresh-faced Brat Pack actors are all in midlife now-Nelson, the oldest, is 51, and sporting what appear to be reading glasses in the group photo.

How unsettling it was, then, to see this Wall Street Journal article about a recent Film Society of Lincoln Center event, at which cast members Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald (Emilio Estevez didn't show) reunited for a panel discussion to honor the movie's 25th anniversary.

It seems like yesterday when I dabbed a little mousse into my mullet, slipped on a pair of parachute pants and strolled down to the local movie theater to see The Breakfast Club, director John Hughes’ 1985 ode to teenage angst and alienation.

The breakfast club 1985 cast