9/10
Official trailer
I started watching The Breakfast Club because I was flipping channels and stopped to figure out what was happening on screen. I was hooked. 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 shouldn’t have held me. It held me for the full runtime on first viewing and has held me for the five viewings since. This isn’t the kind of film I’d normally pick.
It’s 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 isn’t fast but the pacing is correct, every scene belongs, 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 late-act choices that I’ll get to. The 9 is honest.
What grabs me is how little it needs. Five kids, two adults and a library, and it holds me tighter than films with ten times the plot. I’d call it the best teen drama of its decade, and I’d put its economy up against anything the 1980s produced.
The Setup
It’s 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’re 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’s 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 are.
For Writers
The Breakfast Club is a model 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 can’t leave the building, cut to a flashback, or 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 instead of 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 instead of 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 among 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’s 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 drives 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’s 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’s fragile and is trying to figure out how to be braver than he feels.
Judd Nelson plays John Bender, the criminal. The performance drives 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 horrifying moment. It works because Nelson commits to it without trying to redeem the character. Bender isn’t asking for sympathy.
Bender is showing the others what he knows about home and daring them to keep judging him.
The father monologue is the scene I’d point to if someone asked why this film sits at a 9. Nelson could have begged for our pity there, and he refuses, and that refusal is what makes it so hard to sit through. I think it’s the bravest acting in the film.
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’s in detention for skipping class to go shopping.
It doesn’t pretend Claire’s problems are equivalent to Bender’s, but the film also doesn’t let Claire be reduced to her social position. Ringwald plays her as a kid who’s starting to figure out that the role she’s been handed isn’t 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’s constructed out of Cap’n Crunch and Pixy Stix. She sketches obsessively. She’s 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’s alone. She’s accepted being alone. The acceptance 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 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 film introduces the five characters 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’s also a kid whose father is grinding him into a person he doesn’t want to be. Claire is still a princess at the end.
She’s also a kid whose social position has become a trap. The trick is that the type and the specificity coexist. The film doesn’t pretend the types are wrong. It also doesn’t let the types be the full story. If you’re 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 and also more than the type.
Both things are true. The Breakfast Club holds both for five characters across two hours of runtime, the harder version of the lesson. Most writers can hold both for one character. Hughes holds both for five 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 a petty bureaucratic cruelty machine. He treats the students as inmates and the Saturday assignment as a power exercise. When no other adults are watching, he makes deals with himself about what he can get away with.
He’s the kind of authority figure every kid has met and every adult has eventually become if they weren’t careful. The performance is funny first and ominous second, and that’s the right order. Gleason plays Vernon with the full tone of comedic timing, the same tone 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 Bender rebuffs him with a complete refusal to engage, is uncomfortably funny in a way few teen films manage. The “boiler room” scene with Carl, where Vernon drops his professional pretense and admits he’s scared of the kids who used to respect him, is the film’s most 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 kids on this day. The recognition makes the laughs uncomfortable.
Most teen films would write Vernon as either pure comic foil or pure villain. The film writes him as both, the harder version, and Gleason executes both tones.
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’s now mopping floors at the school he once attended. He’s no illusions about the place. He’s no illusions about Vernon. He’s 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.
Carl might be my favorite thing in the whole film. He gets a handful of scenes, and he takes fifty dollars off Vernon with the calm of a man collecting a debt he’s been owed for years. I grin through that entire boiler room exchange.
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 works. When the two characters share a scene, the official authority means nothing because Carl isn’t impressed by it and Vernon can’t 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 can’t directly challenge, consider whether a low-status third character could see through the antagonist in a way your protagonist can’t. The low-status character is harder to write than the protagonist because they need a kind of observational competence that the protagonist doesn’t need to have.
Carl observes everything. He says little. When he says something, it works because he’s held back until then. He’s the film’s secret weapon and a model of efficient supporting-character construction 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’re in detention.
The scene is twenty minutes long and is 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’s nothing wrong with her except chronic loneliness and a habit of lying for attention. Claire admits she’s nothing wrong with her except suffocating social pressure and parents who use her as a weapon against each other. Bender doesn’t 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.
It’s 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 work because every prior scene has been building toward the possibility of these revelations. The film justifies 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 film has trained the audience in the cost of each kid talking, and the talking matters because the film has established the cost.
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’s no longer the unkempt basket case. She’s 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.
This 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 an interesting 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 doesn’t seem to know exactly what it wants the scene to mean.
The makeover is the film’s worst moment. Hughes spends two hours telling me Allison is worth knowing exactly as she is, then gives her new hair, lighter makeup and a different outfit so Andrew can finally notice her. That’s the script flinching.
Sheedy plays it as well as anyone could have, and I’d still have cut the scene. Everything else in the film belongs, and this is the one beat I wish weren’t there.
The Personal Connection
I’ve watched this film six times. I’ve 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 tone at the recognition level even when the scale of the loneliness is different.
Few films in 1980s American cinema treat the quiet outsider as a character with interiority instead of 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. Hughes instead wrote her as a person her social position has mislabeled.
That distinction 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’s the most stripped-down. Hughes doesn’t have a romantic subplot to fall back on the way Sixteen Candles did. He doesn’t have a science-fiction premise the way Weird Science did. He doesn’t have a wish-fulfillment day-off structure the way Ferris Bueller did.
He’s 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, and that’s 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. That 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 emotional content of the film instead of the standard efficiencies of studio production. The 9 rating reflects what those choices produced.
Emotionally, the film is precise in a way few American films of its decade are, 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 tone three years earlier and helped establish the genre Hughes would dominate.
Is The Breakfast Club as good as people say?
A 9, and I’d hand it to anyone who thinks a movie needs a plot to hold them.
The bottle structure is disciplined, the five leads are excellent, Gleason makes Vernon a creep I love to laugh at, and Kapelos turns Carl into the film’s moral compass. What keeps it off a 10 is the makeover, the one moment the film stops trusting Allison. Everything around it is as precise as teen filmmaking gets.
I’ve watched it six times and I’ll watch it again. The film doesn’t get faster on rewatch, and it doesn’t get less. Every viewing reveals another piece of business I missed before. A glance Sheedy gives during the confession circle. A line reading from Gleason in the bathroom scene I hadn’t 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.
