Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez and Ally Sheedy star in this nostalgic look at school friendships thrown into the big wide world, which has so many good points that you wish you could say they amounted to more.

The framework of intertwining relationships among the seven contrasting 22-year-olds who congregate in the noisy St Elmo's Bar, filled with music and smoke, is handled with warmth, compassion and skill by director Joel Schumacher and his players.

And every time the contrived and often archly unreal dialogue threatens to swamp their efforts, David Foster's magnificent score, one of the best composed for an Eighties film, comes to their rescue, giving the relationships an emotional depth not always justified by the script.

It's probably the words, in fact, while contributing the occasional good line - 'Hey, it's our time on the edge' Billy (Rob Lowe) consoles a suicide-bent friend - that fail to give the characters enough dimensions to persuade us to like them for better or worse, here mostly worse.

Without the players and the music, it's doubtful if the story would involve us enough: they're the elements which set St Elmo's if not on fire then at least constantly glowing with their talents.