Andrew McCarthy has spent most of his adult life trying to outrun a two-word phrase. It trailed him through airports, interviews, book tours, middle age, and at least three decades of polite small talk. But for the guy who once embodied the quietly brooding pole of the Brat Pack axis, turning around to face the thing was—naturally—the most dramatic option. “I’d run from it for so long,” he told me, almost amused at his own stamina. “Then I wrote the book and finally understood what the public always knew. This thing wasn’t an albatross. It was… kind of beautiful.”
And so Brats—his documentary autopsy of the most infamous friend group that never really existed—was born. McCarthy wanted to know what this pop-culture comet actually felt like to the people inside it. “I knew what I felt,” he said. “Now I wanted to know what everyone else felt.” Because if there’s one secret the Brat Pack kept better than their fictional curfews, it’s that none of them ever really talked about it.
There’s a gentle irony in watching the once-reluctant poster boy for the era coax confessions from the rest of the crew like a man on a nostalgia-themed spirit quest. “I wasn’t interested in being definitive,” he said. “It wasn’t ‘Here’s what the Brat Pack was.’ It was very subjective. Here’s what it was to me. What was it to you?” That’s the surprising emotional center of the film: a bunch of grown adults, long past the part where hair spray mattered, gingerly poking at this fossil they all helped create.
McCarthy’s theory—delivered with a kind of wry clarity you earn only after decades of hindsight—is that this whole thing was never about them anyway. “We were just the kids who were there,” he said. “It was a seismic cultural shift. Suddenly Hollywood realized kids went to movies five, six times. Grown-ups went once. So they made movies for kids.” The audience, in other words, was the real movement. The Pack just fit the clothes.
And then David Blum coined a phrase that accidentally lasted forever.
“It was such a witty name,” McCarthy admitted. “But nobody wants to be called a brat.” That the Old Guard of Hollywood embraced the label so gleefully—“Who are these punks taking all our jobs?”—didn’t help. Yet the public immediately understood it as a compliment. “They looked at us and said, ‘You represent us.’ I missed that at the time.”
If the film has a surprise MVP, it’s Demi Moore, dispensing Jedi-level emotional wisdom while McCarthy visibly short-circuits across from her. “She was the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the movie,” he laughed. “There’s a moment where I literally ask her to repeat something because I know it’s important, but I can’t even comprehend it yet.” Meanwhile, Emilio Estevez gives off the vibe of a man still keeping one emotional shoe near the exit, arms folded like he’s guarding state secrets. “Different journeys,” McCarthy shrugged. “Different places in life.”
Rob Lowe, unsurprisingly, is the most zen about it all, having figured out decades earlier that resisting the public’s affection was a losing battle. “He realized much quicker than I did that this was a blessing,” McCarthy said. “I came to it late.”
But the most Brat Pack moment in the film might be the absence of its missing unicorn: Judd Nelson. “We were tracking him like a spy operation,” McCarthy said. They finally got him on the phone—he starts diving into stories—and McCarthy basically screams “STOP TALKING UNTIL I GET A CAMERA.” Nelson vanished again like a mist creature until, eventually, the message came: thanks, but no. McCarthy loved that. “That’s part of the Brat Pack too.”
The documentary’s secret weapon is the music—Winwood, Lou Reed, and of course the Simple Minds finale that no one else deserved to touch. “Those soundtracks are half those movies,” McCarthy said. Hughes understood instinctively that teens needed their internal monologue blasted through a synth. The licensing budget, however, was less poetic. “Everyone was basically doing it for… this much nothing,” McCarthy said, pinching his fingers together. “But they all said yes.”
Somewhere in the middle of all this, you realize that McCarthy didn’t make a film about a label. He made a film about re-wiring your relationship with the past—how you see it, how it shapes you, how it messes with you. Because as he puts it, “Nothing changed except me—180 degrees.” And he seems genuinely grateful now, the way people get when they finally stop fighting ghosts.
When I told him the doc felt like the sequel we never got—the one where the characters explain who they became—he smiled. “We all grew up,” he said. “It’s nice to see everyone still here. Older, sure. But still kicking.”
And after four decades, that’s the only ending that ever really made sense.
Watch the interview above and then check out the trailer below.
