Club Kid review – Jordan Firstman’s heartfelt comedy is irresistible

Oct 06, 2026 - 01:19

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Club Kid review – Jordan Firstman’s heartfelt comedy is irresistible

In a grungy backroom of a Brooklyn warehouse, a group of glamorously dishevelled clubbers raise their voices in a secular chat. “What do we want? Drugs! When do we want them? Now!” So begins Club Kid, an irresistible helter-skelter ride through the New York club scene from the comedian, actor and first-time director Jordan Firstman. A portrait of the importance of blood family and chosen family, it’s also one of the most bewitching debuts in recent years.

Peter (Firstman) is the life of the party and has been running his raucous Club Labor for over a decade. He always gets the drugs in, rolls up with the best-dressed crew and knows everyone. But the comedowns – bed-rot days of anime porn, takeout and self-loathing – aren’t getting any easier, and he is screwing up opportunities for the party to get to the next level. “You’re a fucking child,” spits his business partner Sophie (Cara Delevingne in her best performance yet) after he shows up to a lunch meeting with potential investors straight from the rave.

Everything changes when Leonora, a British party girl who he met 10 years earlier, shows up at his door with a 10-year old named Arlo that she claims is his child. Right, Peter remembers, there was that darkroom threesome a decade ago. (“I came inside her?” he asks in disbelief. “Yeah, proper,” Leonora confirms.) Arlo’s mum recently died, and Peter finds himself responsible for the kid. After some lapses in judgment, such as when he neglects to hide his “I love Björk and bareback” T-shirt from his new charge, Peter quickly warms to Arlo and the pair settle into a sweet rhythm, bonding over a love of music, exploring the city and spending cozy nights together as Peter switches on his stove for what seems like the first time in years.

After initially setting strict boundaries to his nightlife friends’ interactions with Arlo (“No talk about dicks or drugs,” he hisses), Peter finds a way to share his life with his son. He brings Arlo record shopping in the East Village staple A1, and introduces him to a DJ friend named Saffron (the luminous Saturn Risin9) who teaches the kid to use mixing decks. It’s the kind of set-up that feels too good to be true, and it is not plain sailing for father and son, with greater challenges to come.

Firstman has held his own on-screen before, particularly in the twisted comedy Rotting in the Sun, but he is magnetic here as a good-natured trainwreck that you can’t help rooting for. Queer life in New York can be messy, and Firstman lets it be. There’s an uncommon warmth that Club Kid bestows to its characters (the glow of its physical film stock renders that physical, too) that extends to its urban setting, even as you can practically smell the hot garbage outside Peter’s Lower East Side apartment. To underline the realness, Firstman cast nightlife personalities such as Alaska Riley and Miss Benny as saucy queens of the scene in addition to Diego Calva (Narcos) as a social worker and confidant and the brilliantly natural Reggie Absolom as Arlo.

There’s a lesser, dumber version of this film that would flatten its story into a lazy redemption arc proclaiming that clubbing is a waste of time while parenthood is truly worthwhile. Unfortunately, that’s also the impression given by the film’s trailer, which makes it seem like an Oscar-bait morality tale about how a cute middle-schooler teaches a wayward club rat about what really matters in life (yuck). While I found the film’s ending a little too neat, Club Kid genuinely resonates as a love letter to queer nightlife because it refuses to sugar-coat its unsavory sides. Normally you have to go to the European arthouse to get this kind of grownup attitude towards partying (I thought of gems such as Victoria and Eden more than once). While the film is not afraid to look nightlife’s problems dead in the eye, it also captures why it can be magic: the cab rides screaming along to Rihanna, the romance of surrendering to the beat, the bodies that intertwine as sun peeks through the windows.

Club Kid is a riot. I can’t think of one visual gag or scripted quip in the picture that doesn’t land. (The man sitting next to me doubled over so violently after one joke about aspiring queer philosophers that I nearly called an ambulance.) It is also a testament to how crucial it is for film-makers to tell the stories they know, and knowing that bathroom stall bumps and blurry after parties that stretch into the afternoon are worthy of 35-millimeter film stock. On stage at the film’s Lincoln Center premiere, no one looked more surprised about that than Firstman himself, but I was not surprised to see it receive a standing ovation; Club Kid is a gem that could have come from no one else.