PLOT: Peter (Jordan Firstman), a drug-addled party promoter in NYC, discovers he has a ten-year-old son.
REVIEW: Jordan Firstman is one of the more provocative personalities to emerge online in recent years. Deliberately abrasive, to the point that after the Cannes premiere of his first feature, Club Kid, he asked if anyone in the audience had a bump of cocaine he could do, Firstman would be easy to dismiss if he didn’t have a lot of talent to back him up. Initially, I was wary that such talents existed, but his film Club Kid, which he directed, wrote, and stars in, is too good to write off. It’s one of the more impressive debuts in recent memory, with A24 having snapped it up for a massive $17 million, with them positioning it as their big Oscar play for the year.
In a lot of ways, Club Kid feels like it has the chance to be this year’s Marty Supreme, although after a crazy first act, which follows Firstman’s Peter as he leads a debaucherous existence among NYC’s queer party scene, the film actually settles into being a deeply affecting comedy/drama. Many will say it’s basically the gay, A24 version of Big Daddy, but to me it almost felt like a modern version of Arthur, where this seemingly vacuous party guy who never takes a thing seriously is suddenly faced with reality and utterly rises to the occasion in a way that surprises everyone — but no one more than himself.
When we first meet Peter, he’s recovering from what seems like a straight decade of nonstop partying. In the first twenty minutes, Firstman’s Peter probably gives DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort a run for his money in the amount of drugs consumed on screen, doing rail after rail of blow, ketamine, or both — with lots of MDMA thrown in for good measure — while he constantly hooks up. In one of these hookups, he actually participates in a three-way with a woman, the first and last time he ever has heterosexual sex, and the result is a son named Arlo, who Peter only learns exists a decade later. Arlo (played by the terrific Reggie Absolom) is ditched on Peter’s doorstep, with his mom having committed suicide and only an abusive stepfather back in England left to take care of him. Initially not wanting anything to do with the kid, Peter soon — to his absolute shock — proves to be a natural with him, and Arlo adores him. Hiding a kind streak that, up to now, has never really been allowed to surface, Peter quickly adjusts to life as a dad, although his social circle and lifestyle prove to be a liability, with his job as a party promoter/part-time drug dealer not exactly spelling stability for his son.
Firstman is terrific as Peter, with him believably compassionate with Arlo, while the relationship between the two of them is deeply affecting. He’s surrounded by an excellent supporting cast, including Cara Delevingne as his deeply coked-out business partner Sophie, Colleen Camp as his sweet neighbour, and — best of all — Eldar Isgandarov as Peter’s roommate Nicky, who describes himself as a “philosopher from Azerbaijan,” but spends most of his time playing Xbox and bullying the teens he plays with online. Babylon’s Diego Calva also shows up later in the film as a social worker who becomes a love interest for Peter.
While the movie does follow a predictable path that’s been well-trodden by other films, it does so with a lot of style (The Studio DP Adam Newport-Berra shot it on 35mm, which is also how he shot another A24 pickup this year, Olivia Wilde’s The Invite). It hits familiar beats, but it has a lot of legitimate laughs, while the final act gives it a gritty, realistic, somewhat anti-Hollywood denouement that keeps it from being a total fantasy.
In the end, I was pretty stunned by Club Kid. Firstman’s vibe, admittedly, isn’t my thing, but damn if he didn’t do a remarkable job here. While it will no doubt be heavily marketed to the queer community, it feels pretty universal, with it — at its heart — being a fairly simple and sweet father-son story, and one that will strike a chord with many.
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