Best Ever
Comedy Drama Movie?

The premise is a bottle episode before bottle episodes had a name. Five high school students, one Saturday detention, a library they can’t leave. A brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal — Hughes’s archetypes, announced in the opening voice-over as if they were commedia dell’arte masks. What follows is ninety-seven minutes of teenagers talking, fighting, dancing, crying, and discovering that the categories that define them are prisons they’ve built themselves.

The casting is perfect in ways that only become clear in retrospect. Molly Ringwald’s Claire isn’t just a popular girl; she’s a popular girl who knows popularity is a performance and hates herself for being good at it. Emilio Estevez’s Andrew isn’t just a jock; he’s a jock whose father’s expectations have made athletics feel like punishment. Ally Sheedy’s Allison isn’t just weird; she’s someone who’s chosen weird because invisibility hurt more. Anthony Michael Hall’s Brian isn’t just smart; he’s someone whose entire identity depends on grades, and when the grades fail, he considers dying. And Judd Nelson’s Bender — Bender is the catalyst, the chaos agent, the kid who’s been hurt so badly he’s made hurting others into a survival strategy.

Hughes wrote the script in two days, allegedly, and it shows — not in sloppiness but in urgency. The dialogue crackles with the rhythms of real teenage conversation: the non sequiturs, the sudden cruelties, the moments where someone says something true and everyone pretends they didn’t hear it. The famous confession scene, where each character reveals why they’re in detention, builds slowly, painfully, the defenses coming down layer by layer until there’s nothing left but five kids who are terrified of becoming their parents.

The politics of the film have aged interestingly. Claire’s makeover of Allison — lipstick, headband, conventional prettiness — reads as problematic now, a suggestion that the weird girl needed to be normalized to be loved. The film doesn’t question it; Andrew’s interest in Allison seems directly tied to her transformation. But this discomfort is also honest to how high school works, to the compromises teenagers make to be seen, to the way even rebellion gets absorbed into acceptability.

Vernon, the assistant principal, is the film’s weakest element by design. Paul Gleason plays him as a cartoon authoritarian, a representative of adult cluelessness rather than a character. Hughes wasn’t interested in the adults; he was interested in what happens when the adults leave the room. Vernon’s threat — “I’ve got you for the rest of your natural born life if you don’t watch your step” — is the sound of institutional power, faceless and cruel. The kids don’t need to understand him. They just need to survive him.

The dance sequence to “We Are Not Alone” shouldn’t work. Five people who’ve spent hours in conflict suddenly prancing through the library, the editing cutting between them, the music swelling. It’s emotionally false in one sense — no actual detention would include a montage — and emotionally true in another. This is how connection feels when it finally happens: sudden, inexplicable, a little embarrassing.

Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” closes the film over Bender’s triumphant fist-pump, and the song has become so iconic it’s easy to forget how earned the moment is. We’ve watched these kids break each other open. We’ve watched them recognize each other. The fist in the air isn’t just Bender’s victory; it’s everyone’s — a gesture that says maybe Monday won’t erase this, even though we know it probably will.

Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.

John Hughes: The Best Ever is archetypes revealing themselves as people. Is The Breakfast Club the Best Ever Teen Movie? You tell us.

Decide for Yourself:

• The Criterion Collection Blu-ray finally gives Hughes the prestige treatment he deserves.
• The 30th Anniversary Edition includes retrospective features with the cast.
• The 4K UHD release captures the library’s institutional lighting perfectly.