2016 is a foreign country, Jordan Firstman reminds us in the opening scene of “Club Kid,” his feature directorial debut playing in Un Certain Regard at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Like Firstman’s Peter and his rowdy friends, piling into an Uber on their way to a party, many of us blasted Rihanna’s album Anti back then without anticipating the new-Rihanna-music-shaped hole that would form in our lives over the next decade. Peter’s distress, however, goes deeper than that: when the film flashes forward “ten years or so” (apart from the fact that all of the characters still use Twitter, this is clearly 2026), his hedonistic lifestyle as a party promoter has turned into a joyless routine of drug use, drug dealing, and hangovers too brutal for daytime functioning.
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These early scenes sometimes flirt with cliché, especially in some of the formal choices used to illustrate Peter’s unhappiness: melancholy shots of the famous New York City skyline and a couple of rather cheesy crossfades. But, already, Firstman’s talent for crafting scenes bristling with life is clear. Even as the story appears to progress along the well-trodden path of the coming-of-age indie, at least initially, Peter’s encounters with other characters are more than opportunities to land knowing jokes that will speak to a Millennial or Gen-Z audience—something Firstman obviously knows how to do very well. The to-camera Instagram videos that made him famous in 2020, although he’d already had a short film at Sundance by then, were a much-needed balm during the various lockdowns of the COVID years.
But these impressions—of “a man who is 5’11”,” of “the mosquitoes when someone says ‘mosquitoes LOVE me,’” etc.—also showed a passionate interest in the nuances of human behavior. In “Club Kid,” Firstman builds dialogue scenes that move with delightful ingenuity, awake to the way a single word or facial expression can shift the tone and direction of a conversation. Even when nothing said or done is particularly funny, it is a joy to watch these exchanges—genuine and unforced, crackling with palpable delight at the cinematic possibilities of expression.
This creativity with dialogue and situations is multiplied tenfold when Peter learns that he not only has a ten-year-old son, Arlo (Reggie Absolom), but must now take care of him, since Arlo’s mother has just taken her own life. It is a testament to Firstman’s talent that he has taken a narrative trope as familiar as the washed-up man forced by fatherhood to finally grow up, and managed to make it feel fresh. It may also be a testament to a lack of collective imagination when it comes to gay parents with untraditional lifestyles: in the encounter between a regular British child and the New York City club scene, populated here by DJs, dolls, muscle gays, and other such somewhat marginal people, Firstman finds actually new and fertile narrative ground.
As Arlo and Peter begin to spend time together, “Club Kid” thankfully resists the “Three Men and a Baby” trope of portraying fathers as constitutionally inept and overwhelmed by basic caring tasks. What’s heartwarming and swoon-worthy here isn’t so much the sight of Peter successfully looking after his son. Rather, it is the way fatherhood comes to be a part of Peter’s relatively unconventional life. After Arlo turns out to have very sophisticated music taste—his party-going mother introduced him to Cocteau Twins at an early age—he is soon seen DJing alongside one of Peter’s trans friends, for example, connecting with her and the other queer people in Peter’s life over their shared enthusiasms, but also, simply, because Arlo and Peter’s friends are all nice, generous people who intrinsically understand and enjoy the value of connection.
Rooted in behavior and interaction, Firstman’s artistic sensibility is as much to do with words as it is with physicality. Together with director of photography Adam Newport-Berra, he crafts an understated but intelligently composed visual style that also brings out the corporeal dimension of life: whether that’s the ravenous sensuality of parties, the radiant beauty and raucous charm of Peter’s friends, the nervy impatience of his coke-addicted former associate Sophie (Cara Delevingne), or the comfort of a sincere hug.
Arlo’s sheer presence brings into sharp focus this everyday alchemy of connection—the charge and possibility it carries—so much so that Peter’s overnight move away from his self-destructive habits feels genuine. Although Firstman’s brand of modern humor highlights the absurdity and hypocrisy of social interactions, it is in no way cynical. On the contrary, his comedy playfully exposes those primal emotions and impulses that we think we’re hiding better than we actually are. This comedy of honesty carries well into drama, essentially blurring the boundary between the two.
In an especially beautiful scene, Peter concludes a bedtime reading of the 1998 young adult novel “Holes” with the stunning aside: “I’ll be honest, I miss Shia on our screens,” referring to the disgraced Shia LaBeouf, who appeared in the film adaptation of “Holes.” After a short pause, and before Peter leaves the room, Arlo then casually tells his dad that he knows how his mother died. The tonal shift in that sequence doesn’t really feel like one, because this father-son relationship has been based from the off on emotional disclosure and honesty—or, as Peter says, in the vernacular of young people in 2026 or so, on not being “awkward.” [A]
