Club Kid: an outrageously funny crowdpleaser
Jordan Firstman’s debut stays true to his irreverent humour while leaving just enough room for sincerity in its sweet story of a queer NYC club promoter who discovers he has a 10-year-old son.
Reviewed from the 2026 BFI London Film Festival
Jordan Firstman first went viral during COVID through a series of hyper-specific comic impressions (including one “of all the clothes people are not wearing right now” and “banana bread’s publicist”) videos on Instagram. In film and TV, Firstman has thrived as a specific type of irreverent scenester in I Love LA (2025-), The English Teacher (2024-2025), and Rotting in the Sun (2023). While consistently funny, there’s a closed-offness to his characters – as if they are too cool for everything and everyone in their orbit. They’re over it. Watching Club Kid, both written and directed by Firstman, you get the sense he has curated this identity only to dismantle it for his feature debut. Firstman stars as Peter, a character who echoes his former on-screen personas, but who allows for a vulnerable, open wound of a performance we’ve never seen from the actor before.
It begins on a Brooklyn club night organised by Peter in 2016, a fantasia of MDMA, pounding house music, and darkroom hookups. In close-up, cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra captures the warmth and vibrancy of this messy dancefloor family in vivid, flashing blues. Peter fades away into the flurry of the night, eyes closed, smile wide, riding high.
Cut to ten years later, he is still doing the same thing. He parties the nights away on just about any drug he can consume and/or sell, and spends the days staving off hangovers. Firstman builds the NYC club scene with such texture you get a sore head second hand. The film is filled with references to actual hotspots like the Market Hotel and Basement (Brooklyn’s answer to Berghain), where Peter mingles with real-life queer icons like Drag Race star Kandy Muse and model/performance artist Amanda LePore (the original 1980s Club Kid). Peter’s got a beautiful, spacious apartment, but he’s saddled with a freeloading roommate Nicky (Eldar Isgandarov, displaying enoyably-neurotic comic timing). Peter doesn’t much enjoy the days, and the nights are starting to drain him, too.
It feels like his cyclical life is unravelling in slow motion, until a discovery smacks him out of his stupor. It turns out Peter is a dad. That night in 2016, Peter had sex with a British woman (known to him as ‘innit babes’) in the darkroom to impress a guy he was trying to hook up with. Now, he’s being introduced to his 10-year-old son Arlo (Reggie Absolom) by fellow party animal Edison (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), who’s brought Arlo over from the UK after his mum’s death. From there the film essentially morphs into an irrepressibly queer version of Big Daddy (1999). An MDMA-loving thirty-something who suddenly has a child thrust upon him is hardly the kind of story you’d anticipate as a sweet, sentimental crowdpleaser, but that’s precisely what Club Kid is.
The script’s free-flowing humour balances niche pop-culture references with great visual gags (to Peter’s panic, Arlo finds a shirt that reads ‘I Love Björk and Bareback’). But the greatest joy in watching Club Kid lies in the chemistry between Firstman and newcomer Absolom. As the shy, precocious Arlo, he brings out the very best in Peter. It’s not always easy: in their first dinner together, Peter gets pizza, only to discover Arlo has a dairy allergy. “Girl, I gave you a fucking pizza!” And the world Peter has built isn’t always a healthy one for Arlo, despite the kid’s ambition to be a DJ. The euphoria Newport-Berra brought to the club scenes in the film’s opening is replaced by icy detachment in later sequences as Peter sees his environment with new eyes – one full of potential dangers.
For all it’s moments of unlikely-father-and-son bonding, Club Kid isn’t just a story about the redemptive powers of parenthood. It also a sensitive reading of the kind of deep seated sadness that can be masked by decades of partying. In a bracing moment of honesty, Peter tells Arlo “I basically don’t have any self-esteem.” Though this aspect of Peter’s personality is thoughtfully explored, we only get a partial picture of why he feels this way. He reveals to a friend that he started having sex at age 15 with men who were 35, and that Mysterious Skin (2004) was a formative influence.
Overall, it’s a triumph of a debut. In combining an intimate study of self-loathing with conventional feel-good sentimentality, Firstman has created something both accessible and profound.
► Club Kid is in UK cinemas 8 January 2027.