Ask any gay man with a social media account, and they likely have an opinion about Jordan Firstman. The backlash-courting queer actor/comedian, controversial most recently because of an online flare-up over querying the sexual realism of “Heated Rivalry,” is labeled either candid or confrontational. He also has a record of taking on sexually explicit projects like Sebastian Silva’s suicide-ideating, ketamine-fueled dark comedy “Rotting in the Sun.” His status as a self-aware, hyper-online provocateur may not seem to suggest the makings of a bona fide filmmaker, but just wait.
While that reputation might have Firstman on guard as he debuts his feature writing/directing debut “Club Kid,” as it will certain circumspect corners of the audience, this terrific movie should put any of those nervous feelings to rest. Even his haters won’t be able to resist what’s announced here as a major filmmaking talent with a sensitive side that belies his brash, internet-based persona.
He also stars as the protagonist of his hugely crowd-pleasing, excruciatingly funny, and poignant first film — one that plays to all sides of the room despite being brazenly, unapologetically queer — which will prime Firstman-savvy viewers to immediately interpret “Club Kid” as autobiographical. That’s because it is.
He plays party promoter Peter, now in his thirties after a decade-plus of MDMA-addled revelry, the kind where all the days blur and blot into one long and sweaty night with a coming horizon in the shape of regret. Firstman may not be playing himself this time, but he is playing a version of that self, having, as he says, spent enough years in Berlin to be labeled “the angel of Berghain” by his new friends, but now ready to put the days-that-became-years of GHB, MDMA, and other letters of the alphabet behind him.
“Club Kid” is exactly about what happens when the lights go up on the party, the shameover of the morning after that becomes a way of being, and the need to do it all over again to stave off last night’s aching after effects. But it’s also about — earnesty alert! — family lost and found, not only because of the queer community formed around the now-orphaned Peter, who lives in the rent-controlled Manhattan his mother left him after she died, but because he wakes up one day to find a child he fathered and never knew about, literally on his doorstep.
“Club Kid” was shot on 35mm on location in New York City with a team of backers including “Anora” Oscar-winning producer Alex Coco and nepo filmmaker Olmo Schnabel, and a millennial cast of queer comedians. So it’s hard not to leave the movie thinking all that’s needed here is an A24 logo slapped onto the opening credits, and it’s ready for the world. But no matter; while Firstman’s aesthetic is loudly in A24’s register, it turns out to be an asset rather than a limitation.
Beginning inside a sensually lit, drug-soaked party and ending as one rages on without you from afar, “Club Kid” drops us into Brooklyn 2016. Peter, sing-screaming Rihanna’s “Sex with Me” in a clown car of an Uber ride with his friends, is headed into yet another bender to remember (but also eventually forget). At a club of the sort that now dominates night culture in Bushwick, rising party promoter Peter ends up hooking up — and then really hooking up — with a couple of hyperactive “innit, babes?” British women in the back room. It’s all inconspicuously taking a turn for the sexual when the movie smash cuts to “a decade or so later,” when the proverbial party is still dying down, but Peter is still living in it — albeit more sweaty and tragic 10 years on.
He’s now made a career out of his drug use with his best friend and business partner Sophie (a marvelous, perpetually coked-out Cara Delevingne, who’s two inches from a breakdown at all times). A few days before the one that’s about to change his life, they have an important sitdown coming up with FiDi investors to help expand their New York party empire. But alas, as he couldn’t help himself once again the night before, Peter wakes up drugged to the gills, rushing to the meeting only to nod off at the table, still in a GHB-spiked stupor. (His reaction to a dropper of hot sauce that looks curiously similar to the one he used last night to get high is one of the film’s many brilliantly funny little pratfalls.)
All of that’s to say Peter’s life is still totally a mess, and his arrested development from a decade of partying has now washed him out to the point where sobriety is maybe never part of his day. (A weekend spent dissipated, hungover, jerking off to internet porn and eating Popeye’s in bed will ring true to anyone who’s ever been gay and in this state.)
Party’s certainly over, though, when one of those British “innit babes” from 10 years ago, Edison (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), shows up from London at his apartment (where Peter lives with an “Azerbaijanian aspiring queer philosopher” who doesn’t pay rent) with an eight-year-old boy. “You’ve got a kid! ‘Yay!,’” she tells him while delivering the news that Arlo (preternaturally gifted young breakout actor Reggie Absalom) is in fact Peter’s child with one of the other women from that opening-scene heterosexual encounter, who’s just died. The first and only time Peter fucked a woman, and now he’s fucked himself into having to finish raising a small boy.
Cue the manic panic, more drug use, and resignation to the idea that there’s no sending this kid back to the U.K.
While it’s a bit sudden how fast the switch flips from Peter feeling wildly ill-equipped for parenting to becoming a nurturing caretaker, he and Arlo turn out to have more in common than not. Arlo, for one, has the music taste of someone who grew up on Pitchfork, eagerly taking to the $300 Elliott Smith record Peter buys for him in a later scene. (The soundtrack on this thing, by the way, rules, from Arthur Russell during the film’s melancholy final act to “The White Lotus” composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s deeply felt original score.) Their relationship, however quickly, becomes the film’s so-far unexpected sweet center, as Peter starts to really appreciate and eventually love Arlo, who has traumas of his own.
A lot of the success of “Club Kid” rides not only on Firstman’s shoulders, but also on the collaborators he’s working with, including cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra who captures a certain lost-era grit in New York as well as in the chaos-packed nightclub sequences. “Club Kid” also takes advantage of New York City as not just a backdrop but a central character in the storytelling, using the city in a way that feels rare onscreen these days.
“Club Kid” freewheels and unwinds like a head rush of a zippy party movie until Arlo’s introduction brings the comedown. It turns out he feels more at home among Peter’s “found family” of queer revelers, discovering his own DJ skills in the process, than he ever did in London. Could Peter really warm to fatherhood? Real emotional stakes start to heighten as he begins recognizing the unexpected realities of his new arrangement, like getting Arlo into school, or keeping the boy shielded from the drug use of his friends while Peter’s own finally starts to diminish. A nervous, tentative romance comes into view with child psychologist Oscar (Diego Calva), and on a date where a namecheck of Gregg Araki’s “Mysterious Skin” becomes not just a tender confession, but a turn-on.
“Club Kid” takes a sharp dramatic turn, in which the nature of Arlo’s living situation becomes even more dire and probably illegal, that almost shouldn’t work in a comedy like this — but it’s a turn that feels inevitable given how “Club Kid” is structured like the rise and fall of a drug experience, a high that crashes down into despair. The emotional arc bends toward “Kramer vs. Kramer” territory with a cathartic (and well-played by Firstman) courtroom oner. Peter may be insecure about his own place in a world where only parts of it have room for him, but as a storyteller with an eye, Firstman is anything but.
Firstman is by now an established comedic voice, but his work on all sides of the camera here leaves pretty of room for revelation, for him to become a genuine discovery beyond an audience of gay, internet-addled millennials. “Club Kid” has real potential to break out bigger than its seemingly niche scope would suggest, with Firstman finally shirking the ironic pose he’s taken online for years to emerge as a sincere storyteller with heart as much as humor.
Grade: A-
“Club Kid” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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