Review | ‘Brats’ sees the Brat Pack from the other side of the looking glass

The movie, airing on Hulu, is a strange but worthy watch: cringey here, unexpectedly revelatory there, sincere and blinkered and articulate and dumb. McCarthy, now 61, is a slightly more wizened and concentrated version of his teenage self, his pale blue eyes still searching for reassurance. The cameras follow him with at times uncomfortable frankness as he dials up Emilio Estevez and Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald and Judd Nelson, Rob Lowe and Jon Cryer, and asks them if he can come over and chat. I know many of us think these people all hang out at the same country club, but the truth is that McCarthy hasn’t seen most of them in 30 years. So, yes, he’s that guy, too, calling long-ago friends out of the blue to talk over the bad old days.

It goes about as well as can be imagined. We hear that Ringwald would “rather look forward” and won’t be participating, and Nelson proves impossible to geolocate, but Estevez, Lowe, Cryer, Sheedy and Demi Moore welcome McCarthy into their homes and engage with him on the subject of being famous and too young to process it. (Who does and doesn’t qualify as a member gets a thorough chewing over at one point, and you’re forgiven if you think, say, Anthony Michael Hall has been done wrong.) What’s really chafing the filmmaker’s biscuits is the June 10, 1985, issue of New York magazine that introduced “the Brat Pack” — the actors, the phrase, the cultural meme — to a world that wholeheartedly adopted it and, in McCarthy’s view (and he’s not alone), diminished the individual talents and career options of every actor involved. “I suddenly felt that I wasn’t being seen,” he says of auditions in the immediate post-“Pretty in Pink” era.

His former co-stars have adjusted better, and the conversations range from the therapeutic to sharp cultural analysis about why the Brat Pack happened and mattered. Estevez acknowledges that the phrase — journalist David Blum’s riff on the “Rat Pack” of Frank Sinatra’s Vegas era — “made us seem like lightweights” but also advises McCarthy that a label has only as much power as one is willing to give it. Sheedy recalls how her “Breakfast Club” character allowed her to come to terms with her own lonely adolescence but admits to feeling a “weird vibe” in auditions after the New York magazine article ran. Lea Thompson (who correctly identifies as “Brat Pack-adjacent”) points out that the new medium of VHS let teenagers watch movies like “Some Kind of Wonderful” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” over and over, giving them and their stars immense cultural power. Lowe is his unflappable self — “I get why it happened; there were just too many of us,” he says — and in the process reveals the truth of personality behind a given pop persona. And Moore, bless her, is that one friend who keeps talking sensibly and empathetically with McCarthy until she’s talked him off the ledge. For a while.

The director also buttonholes “Pretty in Pink” director (and Thompson’s husband) Howard Deutch, “St. Elmo’s Fire” producer Lauren Shuler Donner, novelist Bret Easton Ellis, a film critic, a screenwriter, a casting agent, the author of a book on the Brat Pack and others, and he layers in a wealth of 1980s interview footage of the actors gamely trying to talk their way out of the corner into which the era painted them. It makes for intriguing if scattershot viewing, and when author and cultural critic Malcolm Gladwell tells McCarthy that he was always on Team Ducky — it’s a reference to “Pretty in Pink”; if you know, you know — you kind of feel the actor has it coming. And Gladwell’s point holds: The Brat Pack movies are still a rite of passage because they let young viewers identify with aspects of the characters in a way that helps them make sense of who they’re becoming.

Still, “Brats” may not land the way its maker thinks, if only because people tend to not have a lot of sympathy for the complaints of perceived celebrities. They probably should. As someone who has interviewed a great many actors and directors over the years, I’ve been witness to the infinite variety, individuality, insecurity and common human decency of the so-called movie star. The yutzes — the actual brats — are exceptions to the rule.

Actors are people who are very good at inventing other selves, and sometimes they’re less skilled at feeling comfortable in their own skins. In its earnest, haphazard way, “Brats” testifies to this. The Brat Pack remains a surprisingly rich cultural concept — Would “Friends” exist without it? Why is Tom Cruise not considered a member? Discuss. — but it eroded at least one actor’s sense of self in a way that’s still eating at him four decades on.

Unrated. Available on Hulu. Contains language and substance use. 93 minutes.

Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.