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The grads all live in Washington, D.C., but call their old college haunt, St. Elmo's Bar, home. There's Alec (Judd Nelson), a womanizing, hotshot politician's aide, who desperately wants to marry Leslie (Ally Sheedy), who is in no hurry to settle down since she and Alec have just moved into an apartment roughly the size of an airplane hangar.
Kevin (Andrew McCarthy) is the group's cynic, an aspiring writer who may or may not be gay. He rooms with the career-confused Kirbo (Emilio Estevez), who waits tables at the bar and is obsessed with Dale (Andie MacDowell), an old college classmate turned doctor. Billy (Rob Lowe) is an overgrown child who eschews fatherhood for skirt-chasing, which doesn't drive away Daddy's little rich girl Wendy (Mare Winningham). Finally, there's Jules (Demi Moore), a party girl whose wild ways are becoming a problem.
Not counting Dale, that's seven main characters with seven big problems, a hell of a juggling act. Director Joel Schumacher and co-writer Carl Kurlander drop balls everywhere. It's not so much that the kids' problems aren't interesting, but the duo's screenplay either omits important details or taxes the story's credibility. Key examples: Kirbo goes from having an interrupted lunch date with Dale to stalking the poor woman, who instead of kneeing him in the balls and calling 911, invites him up to her apartment. Wendy and Billy's relationship is clearly a case of good girl loves bad boy, but the writers never define the characters in the context of that relationship, so every scene with Lowe and Winningham has all the heat of an awkward first date.
It's also hard to sympathize with these people and their growing pains, when they're just four friggin' months out of college and look like they've leapt from the cover of the college brochure. (The film tries to save face with the wholesome, chubby Winningham, token casting to appease XL-sized audience members.) Kurlander and Schumacher's script doesn't offer people, but soap opera problems disguised as people, while David Foster's sweeping, awful 'Love Theme from St. Elmo's Fire' ensures that mountains keep getting made out of molehills.
As a result, the cast (Lowe and Estevez, especially) is screwed. Nelson and McCarthy decide to act with gusto and wind up staging an Ali-Frazier-type battle to see who can be the most obnoxious. Sheedy, dressing like a senator's wife, acts so stiff it's impossible to imagine how two guys could fall in love with her. Moore and Winningham come out unscathed, which is a triumph considering the material.
Schumacher wants to make a movie for young people about young people struggling, but he's completely out to lunch, giving us pretty 22-year-olds who live in luxury apartments and publish essays on the front page of a major metropolitan newspaper. Everyone struggles. Everyone triumphs. The music swells. No one cares.
