Sunday, October 19, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema - Downtown, Los Angeles
In the 1980s, if you wanted to see Yuppies in their natural habitat, the ritzy Washington, D.C., suburb of Georgetown was a great place to do it. It was a natural setting for a slick soap opera about young people facing post-college crises, and that's exactly what you get in ST. ELMO'S FIRE. Back in the day, my friends and I desperately wanted to live like the aspiring Yuppies portrayed in this movie: self-delusion was considered very stylish in the mid-1980s. And nearly everyone in ST. ELMO'S FIRE is on the fast track to disillusionment. Billy (Rob Lowe) is the sexy saxophonist who forgets he has a wife and daughter every time he sees a pretty face; hard-working waiter Kirbo (Emilio Estevez) plays the fool for dreamy Dr. Dale (Andie MacDowell, before she started taking acting lessons); ambitious Alec (Judd Nelson) changes his allegiance from the Democrats to the Republicans when he learns the right-wing pays better; rich girl Wendy (Mare Winningham) battles low self-esteem and wrestles with her attraction to Billy; lovely Leslie (Ally Sheedy) sidesteps Alec's marriage proposals and frets over his fast-fading ideals; prematurely jaded writer Kevin (Andrew McCarthy) chain-smokes while waiting for the world to discover his genius; and credit card addict Jules (Demi Moore) exists on a diet of vodka and cocaine until the heavy hand of fate knocks her off her feet. We laughed with these people. We cried with these people. We wanted their cars and their jobs and their wardrobes and their apartments (especially Jules' apartment with the hot-pink Billy Idol mural). Heck, maybe we still do. In 1985, this movie was to people in their twenties what a Douglas Sirk movie was to mid-1950s suburbanites: a glossy, tear-stained catalog of everything you thought you needed to be happy. Unsurprisingly, most critics detested ST. ELMO'S FIRE. But that didn't keep legions of teens and twenty-somethings from storming the theater, whether they were drawn by the sex appeal of Lowe and Moore, the celebration of Reagan-era high life, or the driving theme song from John Parr, which was inescapable on the radio throughout the summer of '85. (James Sanford)