James Y. Lee
It’s no real secret that Jordan Firstman is a man of many talents. It’s always been a question, however, of which way said talents might lead at any given moment. The story of his directorial feature debut, Club Kid, joins the lofty and well-respected ranks of its fellow A24 discoveries and successors—often urban-focused films about charming millenial-aged protagonists down on their luck in some form, which make waves at festivals before garnering widespread acclaim. But even before Club Kid, Firstman often helmed several creative ventures, more aligned with online sensibilities that showed his talents as a performer first and foremost. Short films like Men Don’t Whisper and Call Your Father, which portray unconventional dynamics in gay relationships; impressions and comedy on Instagram in the heat of the COVID pandemic; and performances in high-profile shows like Ms. Marvel and I Love LA. It’s the kind of story we’ve all heard before—a strong multihyphenate talent with an existing online portfolio and a level of comfort in front of the camera expanding his reach into the cinematic realm to test his mettle on a formal level.
To that end, Club Kid is an immensely impressive debut, if not quite the masterpiece invoked in raves from its premieres at Cannes and Telluride. In keeping with Firstman’s ability to expand on traditional portrayals of gay relationships, it’s a loving if not frank ode to the New York queer clubbing scene, one that delivers a tale of fatherhood and the unexpected benefits it brings to all those touched by the positive influence of their children. It is often piercing in emotionality and insight, even if it’s not striking fully-fledged wisdom; it meets expectations of what a crowd-pleaser like this should be, even if it never seems compelled to exceed them. But plenty about Club Kid is undeniable—Firstman’s prowess as a performer and as a writer-director, its charming and honest story’s ability to display its characters’ greatest strengths and most evident limitations, and the discovery of Reggie Absolom, the next in a list of great child performances from this year.
Firstman has cast himself in Club Kid as its protagonist, Peter Green, a club promoter and frequent cocaine dealer who’s visibly in his career’s prime at the very top of the film’s events. Sometime in 2016, we watch as he navigates his way through one of the clubs he’s helping to run alongside his business partner, Sophie (Cara Delevingne), indulging in the thumping music, the frequent drug use, and the hookups and sex occurring inside of the club’s darkroom. In an eventually consequential yet brief encounter, Peter runs into two British women who take an interest in him—which goes, of course completely unreciprocated, given the fact that Peter’s gay. But in a fascinatingly brutal cut to about “a decade or so later,” Firstman makes abundantly clear that that night in 2016 was among the last moments of actual success in Peter’s life and debaucherous career.
Multiple things wind up firmly clueing us into Peter’s new, frankly devastating reality in 2026. Sophie, herself trying to put up a front of a self-possessed businessperson, cuts ties with Peter and decides to go about the club promotion business on her own, after he attends several meetings with potential partners high out of his mind on cocaine. Peter’s current roommate, Nicky—living with him in the apartment that his late mother left for him, and hilariously played by Eldar Isgandarov—continues to pester Peter with wildly uncooperative living habits. And perhaps the most impactful piece of ostensibly negative news that arrives at Peter’s doorstep comes in the form of one of the British women from ten years prior, Edison (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), who informs Peter that he has a biological son; he had sex with her friend that fateful night, and she raised their son, Arlo (Absolom), in London under the grip of a violently abusive household in the decade that followed—a grim reality that she ended her own life in order to escape, eventually leading to Arlo’s arrival in New York.
Peter’s first encounters with Arlo are nothing short of an absolute disaster. For one, he first takes Arlo out to a pizza restaurant and orders a cheese pizza, without knowing beforehand of Arlo’s debilitating dairy allergy, an incident that results in both of them effectively vomiting on each other in the bathroom. Multiple times, Peter calls up Edison, trying to return Arlo to London out of desperation, but Edison has already left the country entirely, and the reality sets in that Peter has to assume the sudden responsibility of fatherhood, for a man who has lived in unconventional found family structures for most of his adult life. One of Club Kid‘s most interesting areas of thematic interest is in that very friction—between the nontraditional, pleasure-focused lives of the queer New Yorkers at raves who have often been disabused of traditional families because of their identities, and the traditionally oriented reasons for why fatherhood as a concept is so enduring.
Anyone broadly familiar with the breed of recently-adult-white-person tale that Club Kid belongs in—including works from the likes of Cooper Raiff, Michael Angelo Covino, Eva Victor, Greta Gerwig, and even perhaps the work of Joachim Trier—is likely to find little to be upset over with Firstman’s film, a linear, realistic, straightforward work that derives its charm from a narratively conventional series of encounters between its characters, yet still has the wit to enlighten us on these people’s greater internal depths. For a time, you can somewhat sniff out the smell of formula on the earliest portions of its script—it won’t take much difficulty, for instance, for a screenwriting professor to point out which parts of Firstman’s structure and action belong on which part of the “hero’s journey.” Most of the film’s primary encounters with Peter are telegraphed this way—but that’s not to say it ultimately doesn’t shed a good amount of that predictability to reach a place of true emotional sincerity.
It’s also worth commending just how little Club Kid indulges in bold-faced sentimentality in the process, largely exchanging it for sharp wit that transmutes into emotionally honest observations about these characters. That’s largely thanks to the fact that Firstman and Absolom’s chemistry is nothing short of absolutely electric. You can identify in Absolom what Arlo might have inherited from Peter, but also the terrible scars left on him from surviving ten years in an abusive household—all of which Firstman cleverly deploys in action rather than conventionally edited flashbacks. And you recognize in Firstman’s performance not just the fact that he’s growing from being in Arlo’s presence, but also the fact that better parts within him are awakening without him even realizing it. Fatherhood seems to come naturally to Peter over time, with a protective instinct in his character that morphs quickly into genuine love and devotion for Arlo, who not only can integrate into his community, but also gives him a reason to get up in the morning and care about how to lead a life of legitimate intentionality.
Club Kid‘s recognition of how those two things can synergize—the queer New York club scene, and a life that recognizes more traditional values of how to look forward into the future— is perhaps its next most fascinating source of wisdom. Drugs are a major fixture and motif over the course of Firstman’s film; a legitimate source of enjoyment at raves and a troubled revenue source for Peter, which he steadily grows sick of and fails to partake as an indulgence, not to mention the fact that Arlo’s presence around it would turn into a legitimate danger to his life if mishandled. But Firstman passes no condescension or moral judgment about the club scene’s overindulgences, rather providing a recognition of young habits that fail to last meaningfully well into an adulthood that intends to plan ahead. You can see in Peter and the group of queer and trans people he surrounds himself with that Firstman truly loves not just the community assembled through these parties, but also the people within it—enough for him to never moralize about the way they lead their lives in the nights that sometimes turn into benders.
Such is the pluralistic, communal vision of love that Club Kid espouses, a natural merger of differing definitions of family that becomes universal in the process. It is inclusive of Arlo and not just the life he wants to lead as a prospective, surprisingly talented DJ, but also the wounds he carries from the loss of his mother and the violence of his father. It welcomes and embraces the queer and trans people in New York prone to seeking out pleasure, but do so in community for a family they’ve built from the ground up. It includes Arlo’s social worker, Oscar (a delightfully charming Diego Calva, who we’ve truly missed since Babylon), who strikes up an initially ethically dubious, flirtatious relationship with Peter that’s mostly played off for cute laughs, but which becomes deeply sincere in the film’s final stretch. And it includes Peter, a man who wants to move past a point in his life where ten years can breeze by in the blink of an eye, bringing with them changes he isn’t equipped to contend with in full because of prior irresponsibility.
It’s valid to think that Club Kid‘s events might come slightly too easily for both Peter and Arlo, but the other shoe does drop eventually—a major logistical oversight that winds up presenting an unpredicted disaster for the longevity of Peter and Arlo’s time together. But the direction that Firstman’s film takes from there is an affirmation of how powerful this kind of paternal love is, and what it means for that love to change into a form you never could have seen coming. A film with this kind of insight, however formulaic it may initially seem, and however much it exists in a league of similar-demographic predecessors, is still a worthy announcement of a very strong voice in cinema. Firstman’s film welcomes you into the club, and then accompanies you on the early-morning walk home—an earnestly contemplative, wistfully exhausted, perhaps still-high invitation to think about the purpose you carry yourself with, and how you grow with the people alongside you. The prospect of this kind of wisdom evolving further with subsequent works is what makes debuts like Firstman’s so fascinating, and exciting, to witness.
