People line up for hours at TIFF to see the latest work from their favorite filmmakers, but it’s also where future directorial stars are born. Take last year: Curry Barker premiered Obsession to the Midnight Madness crowd, and twelve months later he’d made one of the most profitable independent films of all time. This year, a directorial debut generating similar heat is Club Kid, from writer-director-star Jordan Firstman, who seems to come out of nowhere with one of the festival circuit’s biggest darlings. The film premiered earlier this year at Cannes, where A24 beat out several rival bidders to acquire it for $17 million.
Firstman, best known for his social media persona and a supporting turn on I Love LA, plays Peter, a New York City club promoter whose whirlwind nightlife existence gets upended when Arlo, the ten-year-old son he never knew he had, shows up on his doorstep. Peter, who is steadfastly into men, can barely believe or remember that he’s slept with a woman at all, let alone comprehend that he’s expected to raise the unexpected result. After some comedic trial-and-error, Peter begins to see the value he derives for himself by caring for someone else, but his inability to grow up threatens his ability to keep Arlo in his custody.
On paper, I wasn’t in love with the premise of Club Kid, if only because it felt like a subtle variation on a story we’ve all seen before: immature and narcissistic man becomes father, or father figure, to a young child, and grows up in the process. About a Boy comes to mind immediately. And in the broad strokes of its plot synopsis, that’s mostly what Club Kid is: Peter isn’t ready for Arlo, which creates all kinds of hilarious situations, along with some serious ones. It’s the kind of plot machinery you’d expect from this genre. But the devil’s in the details, as it is with any good comedy, and Club Kid is one of the best comedies I’ve seen in years.
Club Kid is deeply submerged in queer culture, with New York City as Neverland, and Firstman playing a character literally named Peter, which feels unlikely to be a coincidence. He’s made a profession out of throwing parties. He lives in a beautiful, light-filled, rent-controlled apartment that’s less his own than it is a permanent crash pad and hangout for a rotating cast of friends and acquaintances. We watch Peter rule the city as his own playground in his twenties, but by the time he coasts into his thirties a decade later, he’s still in pretty much the same place. And now the novelty’s worn off; what once felt shiny and exciting now reads as problematic.
Enter Arlo. Peter is so used to being surrounded by a progressive, adult friend group that he has no idea where the boundaries are with a ten-year-old — he lets Arlo DJ at one of his parties, drops hundreds of dollars he doesn’t really have on records for him, and can’t find a single T-shirt in his own closet for Arlo to sleep in that doesn’t reference sex or drugs. Arlo is well cast, with an earnest, matter-of-fact performance from Reggie Absolom, and the film gives him his own fish-out-of-water arc: dropped into a new culture, new family, and a new country, he’s been steeped by his late mother in so much pop culture and media literacy that he blends in more easily than anyone expects.
The same mechanisms that make the film so funny are also what drive its plot into the third-act custody fight, and that’s where Club Kid is least sure-footed. Like a lot of comedies, it swerves into full seriousness for its climax, and some of the court-case mechanics feel strange and overtly plot-driven. Still, those beats help the film carry emotional weight beyond its comedic depths, even if the landing isn’t quite as graceful as everything that comes before it.
What Firstman captures so well, throughout all of Club Kid, is the restlessness and awkwardness of the specific transition between your twenties and thirties. It’s a transition that’s only gotten muddier as the American Dream itself has morphed over the last several decades. A nuclear family, a house in the suburbs, a steady job, 2.5 kids: those markers of success are either out of touch or out of reach for so many now, and Peter is stranded in the gap that the traditional American dream narrative leaves behind. This is where the film creates its unique thesis that separates it from your common growing-up-via-parenthood story. Fatherhood does change Peter, but Club Kid never feels like it’s prescribing children, wealth, a home in the suburbs, or any version of that dated American dream as the sole answer to that transitional restlessness. Peter’s connection with Arlo is just one way, among others, that connection and commitment to others can find and change you. With the standard markers of success and happiness so in flux, it’s an idea that feels less like a lesson and more of a spiritual relief.
Club Kid is now playing the festival circuit ahead of a limited theatrical release from A24 on November 6.