Writer and Director: Jordan Firstman

Despite the frequent references to drugs, dicks and darkrooms, Jordan Firstman’s debut Club Kid is the feel-good movie of this year’s BFI London Film Festival. While the plot of a man discovering that he has a child has been explored in films such as Three Men and A Baby and Mamma Mia, the hook in Firstman’s film is a little different. The father of the 10-year-old boy who turns up on his doorstep is a 100% gay man who parties hard every night. The title of the film refers to the father as much as the child.

Firstman plays Peter, a club promoter in New York. In the opening scenes set in 2016, we see him attending one of his bacchanalian nights, accompanied by a group of bantering trans women and drag queens. High on MDMA and high on the music, Peter is having the time of his life. The club is decidedly New York: VIP areas, live tattooing, the most glamorous people, from the widest selections of genders. Peter meets a handsome man on the dancefloor, and when they get busy in the darkroom, a pushy English girl joins them.

10 years later, the parties are still going, but Peter is struggling to keep up. The drugs are harder now; there’s GHB, Ketamine, and Coke. The Arcadian days of Ecstasy are over, and now ravers collapse on the dancefloor from taking too much G. Peter would like a night off, but he needs to be present at the club nights as the punters come for him more than his business partner Sophie (an excellent diva-ish performance from Carla Delevingne, particularly when she becomes a kind of hellish ex-wife in the latter half of the movie). She wants to make their brand even more popular and arranges meetings with corporate investors who baulk at the live sex shows. But when Peter turns up for one of the meetings still spinning on drugs, Sophie sets out to oust him from their business.

Soon after, an Englishwoman called Edison arrives at Peter’s apartment with 10-year-old Arlo, claiming the boy’s his son. She then disappears into the night. Although Peter is a lonely figure, he has many friends, and they soon swarm into his flat to take a look at the unexpected boy from England. Among them is DJ Saffron (Saturn Risin9), who takes Arlo under her wing. The other dolls love Arlo too.

While well-acted by Firstman and especially by Reggie Absolom as Arlo, their story is predictable as a comedown. Peter realises that if he is to be a parent to Arlo, then he needs to clean up and grow up. Peter is obviously the Club Kid in this regard. And yet, he’s still attached to his old lifestyle, and he needs a line of Coke, handily already cut out on the living room table, before he can even leave the house in the morning.

Firstman has the American market in mind; the representations of the English characters might grate a little on British audiences. Arlo is stereotypically polite and reserved, while his mother, seemingly from somewhere in Essex, is nicknamed “Innit Babes’ as that is all she seems to say on that eventful night in 2016.

However, even if we know where the narrative is headed, Club Kid is undeniably warm-hearted, and it’s impossible not to be drawn to Peter’s good-naturedness and Arlo’s sweet shyness. And it’s a damn sight more entertaining and less saccharine than last year’s Rental Family, which also explored the relationship between a man and a child, although Brendan Fraser wasn’t the biological father in Hikari’s film. Nonetheless, both films appear to suggest that men are more complete and sorted if they have children. In one telling scene, a red neon cross on the side of a church is seen through the window of a diner. Peter, it implies, has been saved.

Club Kid screened at the BFI London Film Festival 2026 from 7-18 Oct.

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