Jordan Firstman has made his feature directorial debut with Club Kid, and he does not ease into it. The film opens on Peter, a New York party promoter in the underground queer club scene, staggering home after a night of coke- and ketamine-fueled partying, only to learn that the night he thinks he is living is actually from 10 years earlier.
That twist is the engine of the movie, and the reason Club Kid is getting attention now. Firstman wrote and directed the film for himself, and he stars as a man who is forced to reckon with fatherhood after Edison arrives at his door with Arlo, a 10-year-old recently orphaned child. Kirby Howell-Baptiste plays Edison, Reggie Absolom plays Arlo, and Paris Petitjean plays Leonora, while Colleen Camp appears as Evelyn, Peter’s downstairs neighbor, who cuts through the haze with the line, “it’s as good as they say.”
The opening sequence lands harder because Peter’s disbelief is so plain. “You ever just lose 10 years?” he asks, and the movie answers with the kind of plot shift that could have turned glib in lesser hands. Instead, Club Kid was described as a Cannes Film Festival sensation, and the review treats that reaction as earned by a film that is funny, edgy, and unexpectedly direct about the cost of disappearing into nightlife.
Firstman’s movie sits in a long line of stories about men who become parents before they are ready, the kind that stretches back to Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid and runs through films such as Three Men and a Baby and Kramer vs. Kramer. What gives Club Kid its own charge is the setting: New York, shot on 35mm, with insider knowledge of queer club life and the self-destructive glamour that comes with it. Firstman has already shown that edge in HBO’s I Love LA and Sebastián Silva’s 2023 black comedy Rotting in the Sun, but this feels like the moment he steps in as a real screenwriter and director.
The strain at the center of the film is hard to miss. Peter has forgotten a decade of his life, yet the movie keeps insisting on sincerity, not irony, as it sends him from a night of excess into instant parenthood. That makes Arlo more than a surprise reveal; he is the thing that forces the story to stop floating. What remains unanswered is what happened in the missing years, and whether Peter can turn a lost stretch of his life into something that looks like a family.
