The internet comedian and I Love LA star makes his directorial debut with comedy with a surprisingly soft center.
Photo: Adam Newport-Berra
Certain beats from Club Kid, the ebullient new movie written, directed by, and starring Jordan Firstman, keep coming back to me like morning-after flashbacks of an epic night out. There’s the cluster of gay men amping themselves up for the evening by doing a group recitation of Nicki Minaj’s 2015 MTV Video Music Awards speech (one of them describes the mix of coke and ketamine they’re doing as “a little Charlie, a little Kirk”). There’s Firstman’s character, a party promoter named Peter, plaintively insisting that he’s only started dealing on the side “for the safety of my community!” And there’s one of Peter’s friends in a group of terrifyingly funny, beautiful dolls, observing that his longtime business partner Sophie (Cara Delevingne) has been “getting into beefs with 19-year-old non-binaries on Twitter.” Club Kid, which is Firstman’s directorial debut and just had its premiere in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes, is firmly planted in a realm of queer New York nightlife stretching from the Lower East Side to Myrtle-Broadway to whatever part of Queens Basement is in, a joyous mess of a scene that the filmmaker clearly knows and and even more clearly loves, albeit with the rueful affection of someone who is also aware of how easy it is to stay too long at the party.
Ironically, the movie’s boldest gambit doesn’t involve fucking or drugs or edgy quips, but a plot device so conventional that it is both a fanfiction trope and the narrative of an Adam Sandler movie. Just as he’s teetering on the edge of serious substance abuse problems, Peter learns that he has a son, courtesy of a reluctant dabble in hetero sex a decade earlier. Arlo (Reggie Absolom) has been living with his mom in London, but her death prompts her best friend to whisk the boy out of the home of his abusive stepfather and onto the doorstep of his previously oblivious bio-dad. Peter isn’t just unprepared to care for a child; the idea of children is almost alien to him. The fact that his fumbling journey toward fatherhood is not just tolerable but genuinely touching is a testament to the disarming earnestness with which Firstman approaches the clichéd set-up. It helps that Absolom, with his solemn face and broccoli haircut, is adorable while never coming across as cutesy, his watchful affect concealing a dry sense of humor and an alarming temper. But Firstman himself is plenty charming too, as eager to cede the spotlight to his sharper costars as he is to lean into Peter’s arrested development (“Don’t yell at me, just help me” he whimpers to Sophie after turning up to a business meeting still high from the night before).
While Firstman’s worked as an actor, most notably in the series I Love LA and in Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun, his primary medium has been the internet, and in a less literal sense, the stereotype — when it comes to variations on white gay male identity, he’s walked a Lena Dunham-esque line between provocation and self-laceration. In that context, Club Kid’s soft center comes as something of a surprise, but not as much as its sense of visual engagement. The opening scene is a showy stunner of a long take that starts with a rideshare driver murmuring on the phone as he pulls up to pick up his latest fare, which turns out to be Peter and five glittered-bedecked pals whose shenanigans, passing around a bottle and hanging out the windows while singing along to their chosen track, are captured by a rotating camera. Club Kid is funny, and filled with deft jokes, but there’s a stylistic exuberance to it that attests to how Firstman wasn’t just thinking in terms of verbal punchlines. An afternoon stroll with Oscar (Diego Calva), who begins as Arlo’s social worker and becomes Peter’s love interest, is invitingly honey-colored in the sunlight, while a druggy nightclub hookup devolves into a dreamy blur of body parts. Firstman all but preemptively slapped an A24 logo on Club Kid, which doesn’t have distribution yet as of this writing, but his film really would fit into their stable of commercially friendly art flicks, down to its gooey heart.
If there’s a weakness to Firstman’s work here, it has to do with Peter himself, who becomes less tangible the more the movie tries to open him up. Firstman has no trouble coaxing fully formed people out of broad types elsewhere. Arlo turns out to love Massive Attack and Elliott Smith, and to have a sadly levelheaded understanding of his mother’s suicide. Devon (Nigil Whyte) is the sensible friend with the “big boy job” who, when asked what he’s been up to lately, mentions he’s gotten into fisting (“low key spiritual”). And Nicky (Eldar Isgandarov), the “aspiring queer philosopher” from Azerbaijan who’s been crashing in Peter’s spare room, damn near walks off with all the best lines (when asked by a prospective new housemate if he’s clean, he answers chipperly “Just tested! I’m on PrEP!”). But for all the specificity the film gives to its parties and partiers, it can’t figure out how to give Peter the same roundedness. Trauma gets applied to Peter’s background so nonspecifically that even the character is uncomfortable talking about it; he squirms away from Oscar’s inquiries into his past until he’s reassured that he’s “interesting.” When he confesses to his lack of self-esteem and how he doesn’t like himself much, it feels like an explanation being applied after the fact to his hard partying, rather than the reason behind it.
It’s hard to tell if these false notes are due to Firstman feeling obligated to explain that his character is, as he puts it, “damaged goods,” or because he just doesn’t know how to be more tender to his stand-in. As is, Peter feels more legitimate grinning back at his friends as the beat drops at the club than he does giving a big speech about what he’s gained from parenting — as though Firstman knows how to subvert every cliché except the ones he applies to himself.
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