Judd Nelson

In The Breakfast Club (1985), Judd Nelson's John Bender gets the other pupils talking by giving them something to push back against. His aggression is useful in a film that begins with school types and needs to make us listen to them. Nelson makes the detention feel competitive before it can become companionable. We value that awkwardness, though John Hughes sometimes allows him to keep pressing long after the point has landed.

That rebellious part helped establish an early image, reinforced by the Brat Pack association that followed The Breakfast Club and Joel Schumacher's St. Elmo's Fire (1985). The subsequent work is less easily contained by that label. Nelson voiced Hot Rod in the Transformers film (1986), then played Nick Peretti in New Jack City (1991). The shift to the sitcom Suddenly Susan (1996–1999), as Jack Richmond, put him in a television lead. Those credits are a useful corrective to treating one detention-room performance as the whole career.

In The Breakfast Club, the group scenes benefit from Emilio Estevez's competitive edge, while Ally Sheedy helps prevent an easy slide into cosiness. Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall give us more reason to care about the people behind the school labels. Nelson is forceful enough to get the arguments started, but he is not always the person we most want to hear from. We grew tired of Bender when the complaints about parents began repeating themselves and his volume took the place of persuasion. Hughes needed to question those complaints more firmly; leaving them largely unchallenged does Nelson no favours.

For us, Bender is the clearest place to see both what Nelson supplies and what a director needs to control. The troubled boy beneath the aggression matters more than another round of raised voices. Nelson can suggest that vulnerability, but the writing has to leave him room to do it. Start with The Breakfast Club, with the caveat that its quieter actors often give the better reasons to stay.