{"id":644994,"date":"2026-05-15T16:16:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T16:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/644994\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T16:16:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T16:16:08","slug":"club-kid-review-jordan-firstmans-winsome-clever-dramedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/644994\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Club Kid’ Review: Jordan Firstman’s Winsome, Clever Dramedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe writer and actor Jordan Firstman<\/a> \u2014 known for viral web videos, for films like Rotting in the Sun<\/a>, for the television series I Love LA<\/a> \u2014 is an acquired taste. He often plays into a certain abrasive, ditzy stereotype about gay men who live in big cities: sex-crazed but loveless, self-conscious and self-aggrandizing at once, literate but dumb, politically aware and yet eager to transgress supposed civility. As a nascent star, he\u2019s been pretty divisive, both embraced for being a gadfly who actually puts in the work and scorned for what is viewed as brash over-confidence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tFirstman\u2019s debut directorial effort, Club Kid, shrewdly acknowledges those garish personality tics, which have both endeared and repulsed audiences. Firstman plays Peter, a drug-happy party promoter tripping the light fantastic in New York. He and his gregarious friends, a queer melange of DJs and scenesters and enablers, have seized a corner of the city\u2019s nightlife and turned it into something like a livelihood. In Peter\u2019s case, his work provides a neat cover for what appears to be a pretty serious dependence on cocaine and other narcotics. But he\u2019s not hurting anyone besides himself, so what\u2019s the harm really?\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tClub Kid\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n

\t‘Baby Boom’ meets the dark room.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
Cast: Jordan Firstman, Cara Delevingne, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Diego Calva, Reggie Absolom, Eldar Isgandarov, Colleen Camp
Writer-director: Jordan Firstman
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 59 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tIn its loud, grating first scenes, Club Kid deliberately tries patience. It succeeds in both seducing us into the party and making us want to go home to bed. We can sense that a downfall is coming \u2014 Peter is just too rude and hedonistic to not be careening toward some sort of comeuppance \u2014 but it\u2019s unclear how hard, how nihilistic Firstman is willing to get.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tTo our surprise, Firstman instead steers his film toward one of cinema\u2019s most cherished, and some might say hoary, conventions. The story abruptly jumps forward about a decade, and the consequences of a messy dark-room sexual encounter are suddenly staring Peter in the face in the form of a 10-year-old boy he\u2019s told is his son. Thus, Club Kid manifests many a gay guy\u2019s nightmare: a rare (singular, even) dalliance with a woman has resulted in a child and, thus, the death of fun.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tPeter greets the arrival of this boy, named Arlo (Reggie Absolom), with just that kind of panic. He\u2019s been asked to take custody following the death of Arlo\u2019s mother, making this something of a Baby Boom situation, albeit with a tween rather than an infant. Conscious of predecessors like that one and C\u2019mon C\u2019mon<\/a>, Firstman endeavors to figure out how the structural demands of this well-worn accidental-parent narrative might graft onto a portrait of solipsistic gay-millennial malaise.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tClub Kid, a winning and clever film, does some Hollywood airbrushing to make things blend together. Peter acknowledges that he has issues with drugs, and thus promptly quits them (mostly, anyway), a considerable smoothing out of how a significant life change like that would likely play out in real life. But Firstman and Absolom have such a lively, natural rapport that one doesn\u2019t really mind the only-in-the-movies ease with which they adapt to one another. And it\u2019s certainly a relief to settle into such a cozy, familiar plot after the thump and stress of the film\u2019s beginnings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThough the film gradually shifts into drama, Firstman is careful not to forget the comedy. He gets especially good results from actor and model Eldar Isgandarov as Firstman\u2019s squatter houseguest Nicky, a curious, elfin creature who gives many of the film\u2019s funniest line readings. Firstman has populated his film well, making good use of Isgandarov, Colleen Camp, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, and Diego Calva as a seriously sexy social-worker\/love interest. It\u2019s a merry, disarmingly friendly ensemble, all orbiting around Firstman\u2019s offhandedly charming lead performance.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMight there be a hint of something vain, or self-flattering in that charm? Sure. The film exists partly as an advertisement for Firstman\u2019s softer side. He gives Peter little friction in his quest to be better; parenting skills come quickly and naturally, sprung out of an innate decency \u2014 which Firstman is perhaps arguing exists in him as well, haters be damned. But many actor-directors in the past have given themselves just such a spit-shine, so we probably can\u2019t begrudge Firstman for doing the same. He does do some awfully convenient exculpatory psychological analysis, though. I maybe don\u2019t fully buy that all of Peter\u2019s bad behavior can be explained away by, and forgiven because of, his repeated insistence that he just doesn\u2019t like himself very much. There\u2019s some deflection happening there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Club Kid isn\u2019t really a whitewashed vanity project. It\u2019s a confident, exciting directorial debut, stylish in an unobtrusive way and agreeably paced. It is cognizant of at least some reality, too: Firstman eventually brings the homey fantasy back down to earth, recognizing that bureaucracy would inevitably come to bear on this quirky little found family.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tPeter might be matured, and humanized, by the imposition of fatherhood, but the movie doesn\u2019t attach exactly the same moral weight to that shift as do movies like Raising Helen and Big Daddy, or the sneakily conservative urgings of some of Judd Apatow\u2019s films. Club Kid doesn\u2019t condemn the world that Peter is suddenly snatched out of, it just makes the more personal argument that it was an environment to which Peter had grown particularly ill-suited.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tI don\u2019t think the film is a public renouncement of Firstman\u2019s social milieu, a \u201cguys, haven\u2019t we grown out of this?\u201d bit of smarm from someone trying to give his image a mainstream polish. But it is, maybe, suggesting to those who might be lost in the party that life can be led with more \u2014 and I apologize for using this particular buzz word \u2014 intentionality. It\u2019s a call to consciousness, really, a gentle urging that slowing down is not giving up, that cool is not the only currency, and that what happens in the dark room may not always stay there. Something to keep in mind as another Pride approaches, perhaps.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The writer and actor Jordan Firstman \u2014 known for viral web videos, for films like Rotting in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":644995,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[18451,252484,32176,276723,88,158549,206],"class_list":["post-644994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-cannes","tag-cannes-2026","tag-cannes-film-festival","tag-cannes-film-festival-reviews","tag-entertainment","tag-jordan-firstman","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=644994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/644995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=644994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=644994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=644994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}