A docudrama on the early days of pop icon Madonna arrived on VOD this week and is already a hot seller on iTunes. The film, titled Madonna and the Breakfast Club, focuses on the time before she became a star, back when she was struggling in New York City in the late 1970s and early 1980s and playing drums, guitar, and keyboard — and, eventually, occasionally singing — with a band called Breakfast Club.
How did she get from there to fame and fortune as the “Queen of Pop” in just a few short years? “She’s the one who made it happen for herself,” one of the interviewed members of the group says in the trailer for the doc, which you can watch here:
The one thing that obviously stands out with Madonna and the Breakfast Club is the actress playing Madonna in the film’s dramatizations, Jamie Auld, looks strikingly similar to the real deal. By the end of the trailer, it is easy to forget that you are not, in fact, watching the actual Madonna dance and sing and pose for re-creations of famous photos with then-boyfriend and bandmate Dan Gilroy (who is interviewed in the film and is also played on screen by actor Calvin Knie).
Madonna and the Breakfast Club is directed by Guy Guido, a new face on the documentary landscape, and the film is what it is because he saw Auld working at a doughnut shop in Manhattan and commented on how she looked like a young Madonna. “I didn’t approach her at first,” Guido says in an interview with Digital Journal, “but after my frustrating attempts to cast this through traditional routes like talent agents and casting directors, I decided to approach her to see if she had any interest in acting and if she had ever been told that she looks like a young Madonna.”
She said yes to both, and here we are. And the project isn’t quite over yet, as Guido hopes to release a soundtrack album featuring some of those early songs of Breakfast Club (who went on to some success of their own later, sans Madonna, with the hit “Right On Track”). Perhaps Auld will go on to bigger things now, too — Digital Journal’s review of the doc says she is “fantastic” and “going places.” Meanwhile, the filmmaker tells the site that he hopes to make a similar film about Cyndi Lauper next.
You can now rent or buy Madonna and the Breakfast Club via your cable provider or any digital outlet now courtesy of The Orchard.
