The screenwriting debut of James Hughes, son of executive producer John Hughes, New Port South revisits the elder Hughes' old stomping ground—the morally bankrupt Midwestern suburban high school—for a tale of suburban ennui that's like The Breakfast Club meets Fight Club. Part Pump Up The Volume-style adolescent wish-fulfillment, part ham-fisted allegory, New Port South stars Blake Shields as the ringleader of three artistic teens doing time at the titular high school, which seems to specialize in reading, writing, and crushing its students' spirit. Smart but frustrated, Shields finds an outlet for his considerable angst when he learns about a troubled former classmate who was institutionalized under mysterious circumstances and later became infamous for springing teens from oppressive institutions. Sensing a kindred spirit, Shields adopts the unseen troublemaker as an ideological mentor, and with the help of his two best friends, sets about overthrowing the dominant paradigm by pasting 'zine-style collages all over the school walls and pulling off other acts of petty subversion. But Shields' hijinks soon veer into darker territory, and before long, he's behaving like an adolescent dictator-in-training, stopping just short of goose-stepping through gym class and declaring 1,000 years of lunch break. Ambitious but muddled, New Port South begins like an anti-authoritarian tract, as Shields spouts heavy-handed rhetoric about the evils of socialization and regimentation with the painful earnestness of an undergraduate who's just discovered Marx. But after thoroughly establishing New Port South as a soulless hell on Earth populated by put-upon kids and sadistic teachers, Hughes and director Kyle Cooper do an inexplicable about-face late in the film, switching allegiances from the troublemaking trio to the suddenly sympathetic teachers. It's a puzzling, reactionary move for a movie distinguished largely by its empathetic treatment of youthful rebellion, but it's also fitting for a film whose characters' motivation and personalities shift radically from scene to scene. Like the similarly themed but superior Fight Club, New Port South spends the vast majority of its time raging against the machine before deciding, on second thought, that the machine isn't so bad after all.