Club Kid

There is an irresistible double meaning buried in the title of Club Kid, the remarkably assured feature debut written and directed by Jordan Firstman. It describes both the underground nightlife culture in which its protagonist has spent most of his adult life and the unexpected child who forces him to reconsider everything that culture once represented. Peter Green, played by Jordan Firstman, is a New York party promoter whose professional success has become indistinguishable from his personal collapse. Once the magnetic centre of a queer nocturnal universe, Peter is now trapped inside the very persona that made him important: he sells the experience, consumes the merchandise and performs perpetual abandon for an audience that grows younger while he remains stubbornly in place. The film understands that such a life can be simultaneously exhilarating and profoundly lonely. Its clubs are not depicted as dens of moral corruption, nor is Peter’s eventual transformation framed as a simplistic rejection of queer pleasure. Instead, Club Kid asks a more unsettling question: what happens when a space that once offered freedom becomes an excuse never to move forward?

That tension is established through a sensational opening sequence set roughly a decade before the main story. Cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra places the camera inside a cab packed with revellers and sends it spinning through a dizzying 360-degree movement, catching faces, gestures and the driver’s magnificently unimpressed expression as Peter and his friends hurtle towards another night of excess. The effect is intoxicating but faintly claustrophobic, an invitation to the party that already contains a warning about the inevitable comedown. Inside the club, Peter and his business partner Sophie, played with volatile, scenery-chewing energy by Cara Delevingne, preside over an empire built from music, drugs, sex and the fantasy that dawn never has to arrive. During one particularly blurred encounter, Peter—who otherwise sleeps with men—has sex with a British woman named Leonora, played by Paris Petitjean. The film then jumps forward approximately ten years, and the contrast is brutal: the party is technically still going, but Peter now resembles a man haunting his former triumph. His offhand question to a neighbour—whether she has ever simply lost ten years—lands as both an excellent joke and the confession of someone who has finally noticed time passing.

Reality arrives at Peter’s rent-controlled apartment in the form of Edison, portrayed with hilariously abrasive directness by Kirby Howell-Baptiste, and a quiet ten-year-old boy called Arlo. Leonora has died, Edison explains, and Arlo—an unwanted product of that long-forgotten encounter—is Peter’s son. The premise carries unmistakable echoes of familiar comedies about irresponsible men suddenly entrusted with children, but Club Kid gives that formula a sharp queer specificity. Peter is not merely unprepared for parenthood; he is barely capable of caring for himself, sharing his home with an aspiring philosopher and professional freeloader played by Eldar Isgandarov, dealing drugs to supplement his shrinking income and repeatedly consuming enough of his own supply to endanger both his career and his health. His first attempts at fatherhood unfold through comic disasters rather than miraculous competence: profanity is absorbed, adult T-shirts are innocently worn, inappropriate environments are visited and bodily fluids are exchanged in ways no parenting manual would recommend. Yet Peter’s clumsiness never becomes cruelty. Beneath the panic, he immediately begins making room for Arlo, and that instinctive willingness to try becomes the first convincing indication that he may possess more emotional resources than he imagined.

The film’s emotional centre belongs to the chemistry between Jordan Firstman and Reggie Absolom, who plays Arlo without the artificial cuteness imposed on so many cinematic children. Arlo is observant, musically sophisticated and familiar with queer culture, with tastes that stretch from Cocteau Twins to Elliott Smith rather than the generic pop choices screenwriters often give precocious youngsters. His knowledge makes him neither a miniature adult nor a convenient oracle; it suggests a child who has already learned to navigate unstable circumstances by paying close attention to the grown-ups around him. Through Arlo, Peter begins to experience New York anew—not as an endless route between dance floors, bathrooms and morning-after regret, but as a city in which ordinary rituals can carry their own excitement. Their musical exchanges, domestic experiments and increasingly natural companionship allow Peter to discover that responsibility is not necessarily the enemy of freedom. If anything, committing himself to another person gives his life a direction that ten years of chemically assisted spontaneity never could. The film’s most persuasive insight is that Peter does not become a different man overnight; the qualities that made him a gifted host—his attentiveness, humour, protectiveness and ability to create community—are redirected towards someone who genuinely needs them.

This transition is supported by a lively ensemble, although the film remains essentially a two-hander. Colleen Camp brings eccentric warmth to Peter’s downstairs neighbour, while Diego Calva plays Oscar, the handsome child specialist whose professional involvement gradually opens the possibility of romance. Oscar could easily have been reduced to a reward for Peter’s improved behaviour, but Diego Calva gives him a steadiness that exposes Peter’s deeper insecurity: Peter can imagine being desired for a night far more easily than he can believe himself worthy of lasting affection. Meanwhile, Sophie’s decision to end their business partnership prevents Peter’s personal growth from erasing the damage he has inflicted on others. Cara Delevingne pushes the character towards caricature at moments, but Sophie’s anger serves an important purpose; she reminds us that Peter’s addiction has consequences that cannot be cured by a charming relationship with his son. Produced with the involvement of Alex Coco, the film shares the street-level empathy of contemporary New York independent cinema, finding humour in chaotic lives without treating those lives as jokes. The eclectic soundtrack and the textured 35mm photography reinforce the sensation of inhabiting a real cultural ecosystem rather than visiting a carefully sanitised movie version of queer nightlife.

Where Club Kid becomes less secure is in its determination to make Peter’s redemption emotionally overwhelming. The relationship between father and son develops with surprisingly little sustained resistance, making Arlo occasionally feel designed to facilitate Peter’s rehabilitation rather than complicate it. Serious questions about schooling, legal guardianship, addiction and basic financial stability are introduced, but several are resolved through Peter’s sincerity before their full dramatic implications can take hold. When social services and the courts enter the story, the intimate dramedy expands into a more conventional custody narrative, and the film’s generous running time begins to show. Jordan Firstman delivers the major emotional speeches with genuine vulnerability, yet the camera sometimes lingers on his tears so insistently that the scenes risk feeling like a filmmaker pleading the case for his own character. Arlo’s development as a young DJ is similarly charming but a little too neat, tying the child’s identity to Peter’s world in a manner that feels more screenwritten than discovered. These weaknesses do not negate the emotion, but they reveal the tension inherent in a project whose writer, director and star is occasionally reluctant to let his protagonist remain uncomfortable or unlikeable for very long.

Even with those indulgences, Club Kid succeeds because it refuses the easiest moral conclusion. Peter does not have to condemn the clubs, abandon his queer community or transform into a model of conventional domestic respectability to become a responsible father. The film recognises those imperfect friends and nocturnal spaces as a legitimate found family, capable of providing tenderness, protection and belonging even when their behaviour is chaotic. What Peter must surrender is not pleasure but avoidance—the belief that an endless succession of nights can protect him from grief, ageing and accountability. The bittersweet closing movement understands that maturity is not the moment when the party is declared worthless; it is the moment when one can hear it continuing in the distance and choose, without resentment, to be somewhere else. Funny, sexually frank, visually vibrant and unexpectedly affecting, Club Kid announces Jordan Firstman as a filmmaker with a distinctive comic voice and a sincere interest in the vulnerable people concealed behind flamboyant performances. Its narrative may follow a recognisable route, but the cultural specificity, emotional openness and marvellous partnership between Jordan Firstman and Reggie Absolom make the journey feel personal, generous and alive.

Club Kid
Written and directed by Jordan Firstman
Produced by Alex Coco, Galen Core, Ryan Heller
Starring: Jordan Firstman, Cara Delevingne, Diego Calva, Reggie Absolom, Eldar Isgandarov, Miss Benny, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Colleen Camp
Cinematography: Adam Newport-Berra
Edited by: Not yet officially announced
Music by: Cristobal Tapia de Veer
Production companies: Topic Studios, Stay Gold Features
Distributed by: A24 (United States), Metropolitan FilmExport (France)
Release dates: May 15, 2026 (Cannes) November 4, 2026 (France), November 6, 2026 (United States)
Running time: 126 minutes

Seen on 11 September 2026 at the Deauville International Center