![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/7fee5662e5dca0bb0e49cb0a64b4cf0097-clubkid.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n The internet comedian and I Love LA star makes his directorial debut with comedy with a surprisingly soft center.
\n Photo: Adam Newport-Berra\n <\/p>\n
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\u2019s the cluster of gay men amping themselves up for the evening by doing a group recitation of Nicki Minaj\u2019s 2015 MTV Video Music Awards speech (one of them describes the mix of coke and ketamine they\u2019re doing as \u201ca little Charlie, a little Kirk\u201d). There\u2019s Firstman\u2019s character, a party promoter named Peter, plaintively insisting that he\u2019s only started dealing on the side \u201cfor the safety of my community!\u201d And there\u2019s one of Peter\u2019s friends in a group of terrifyingly funny, beautiful dolls, observing that his longtime business partner Sophie (Cara Delevingne) has been \u201cgetting into beefs with 19-year-old non-binaries on Twitter.\u201d Club Kid, which is Firstman\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Ironically, the movie\u2019s boldest gambit doesn\u2019t involve fucking or drugs or edgy quips, but a plot device so conventional that it is both a fanfiction trope<\/a> and the narrative of an Adam Sandler movie<\/a>. Just as he\u2019s 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\u2019t 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 clich\u00e9d 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\u2019s arrested development (\u201cDon\u2019t yell at me, just help me\u201d he whimpers to Sophie after turning up to a business meeting still high from the night before).<\/p>\n While Firstman\u2019s worked as an actor, most notably in the series I Love LA and in Sebasti\u00e1n Silva\u2019s Rotting in the Sun, his primary medium has been the internet, and in a less literal sense, the stereotype \u2014 when it comes to variations on white gay male identity, he\u2019s walked a Lena Dunham-esque line between provocation and self-laceration. In that context, Club Kid\u2019s 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\u2019s a stylistic exuberance to it that attests to how Firstman wasn\u2019t just thinking in terms of verbal punchlines. An afternoon stroll with Oscar (Diego Calva), who begins as Arlo\u2019s social worker and becomes Peter\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n If there\u2019s a weakness to Firstman\u2019s 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\u2019s suicide. Devon (Nigil Whyte) is the sensible friend with the \u201cbig boy job\u201d who, when asked what he\u2019s been up to lately, mentions he\u2019s gotten into fisting (\u201clow key spiritual\u201d). And Nicky (Eldar Isgandarov), the \u201caspiring queer philosopher\u201d from Azerbaijan who\u2019s been crashing in Peter\u2019s spare room, damn near walks off with all the best lines (when asked by a prospective new housemate if he\u2019s clean, he answers chipperly \u201cJust tested! I\u2019m on PrEP!\u201d). But for all the specificity the film gives to its parties and partiers, it can\u2019t figure out how to give Peter the same roundedness. Trauma gets applied to Peter\u2019s background so nonspecifically that even the character is uncomfortable talking about it; he squirms away from Oscar\u2019s inquiries into his past until he\u2019s reassured that he\u2019s \u201cinteresting.\u201d When he confesses to his lack of self-esteem and how he doesn\u2019t like himself much, it feels like an explanation being applied after the fact to his hard partying, rather than the reason behind it.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to tell if these false notes are due to Firstman feeling obligated to explain that his character is, as he puts it, \u201cdamaged goods,\u201d or because he just doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s gained from parenting \u2014 as though Firstman knows how to subvert every clich\u00e9 except the ones he applies to himself.<\/p>\n Sign up for the Vulture Daily<\/p>\n An entertainment newsletter for the pop-culture obsessed.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n