'Club Kid' Takes a Peter Pan Story into the Nightlife
A midday comedown can be brutal enough without having a child dropped in your lap. Sometimes, it might be just what you need. American filmmaker Jordan Firstman’s debut feature as writer, director and star, Club Kid, is a coming-of-age story, twofold: Firstman’s Peter, a club kid and party promoter in New York City, must grow up. When a doe-eyed 10-year-old named Arlo (Reggie Absolom) arrives at his doorstep after the death of his mother, whom the definitively gay Peter does not remember impregnating, it’s off to the races.
Between Firstman’s rise to Internet fame during a pre-Reels era of Instagram to Alex Coco, the Academy award-winning producer of Anora (2024), boarding the film as a producer, the journey to making Club Kid has been one of legends. Since its May debut at the Cannes Film Festival, it’s gained a reputation as one of the funniest movies this year – a bold statement by a cool artist whose status as a respected filmmaker was cemented in the company of numerous career auteurs.
When I spoke to Firstman at the San Francisco premiere of Club Kid, he told me about the parallels he sees between himself and Peter:
“I'd like to think we share the same soul and the same care for people and love for people, much to our own detriment sometimes… I've always felt like I wanted to be part of a pack or a group, but I never truly fit in. I think Peter feels that way in a lot of ways.”
Club Kid shows metropolitan queer nightlife in a way that most projects aiming for mainstream attention only glance at or use as shorthand through one or two outdated signifiers. By comparison, Firstman’s film is populated with real underground artists and niche cultural icons whose experience in the scene lends the film a light-footed groundedness, free from some paternalistic sense of responsibility to “get something right”; it just gets it right. That paternalism is instead banked and expertly deployed toward the emotional arc of the film: Arlo.
Absolom is a sweetheart in every shade, and he unlocks the movie for every type of audience. From Arlo’s near-silent introduction to his slow peel-back that reveals his esoteric music taste and affinity for the DJ life, the film grows warmer and warmer in his presence. Halfway through, it becomes clear that this film is about their journeys and how they can heal each other. It’s all very winning and very sweet, so sweet that it becomes sugary. Fortunately, Firstman has solid enough instincts to know that too much of a good thing is possible.
The young Absolom was also present at the premiere. He reflected on his experience with the film:
I had no idea what an actual club was like, because I had no family that had been enough to tell me stories… It was a really valuable experience and the music that was played and that was on like my mix, my DJ kind of mix, was really good and I really liked all the music that was played in the club. It seemed like a really nice place to go back to and something like I would do when I'm older.
What starts as something of an incisive look into the highs and lows of living the endless whirlwind of nocturnal living becomes a story of how found family really can save you, and – yes – biological children can be found family. The game of riding lines between the open-heartedness on display and the hard realities of the world isn’t often original, but it’s never anything less than satisfying.
Characters drop in and out of the film, and the emotional thorniness they provide can be handwaved away with ease if they don’t add to the cozy emotional core of the film. Fortunately, they’re all pretty brilliant anyway. Saturn Risin9, Miss Benny and Alaska Riley play three musketeers to Peter and land some of the film’s funniest lines, Colleen Camp and Eldar Isgandarov make for one of 2026’s greatest on-screen duos, Diego Calva has never been more gorgeous or charming, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste should genuinely land an Oscar nomination for one of the greatest single-scene performances I’ve ever seen.
It’s a wonderful ensemble that boosts the lived-in world while maintaining a heightened comedic tone and they all support the emotional throughline, the one that really centers the whole project.
Saturn Risin9 spent formative years in San Francisco. I asked about their journey and connection to their role as Saffron:
I met Jordan at a party, so I knew there was no way he could tell a wrong version of this, because he lived it. Saffron's journey is so important to me because I think a lot of times, though we are locked into the nightlife as dolls, we often don't get seen in ways that are past it. Saffron gets to be maternal, she gets to be a best friend, she gets to be a business partner, and she gets to change her life, potentially, you know? And that's really nice to see.
Does the film view nightlife as child’s play? Is this gay Big Daddy (1999)? Is the ending quite conservative? Maybe! The real takeaway – or at least the one that Firstman is able to drive home – is that comedy doesn’t have to be relegated to sheeny studio outings. There’s a sincerity to his script that mints him as a true blue filmmaker, but most importantly, this movie is a riot. Were it not for a few fistfuls of ham at inopportune moments, Club Kid comes close to landing in Nora Ephron territory of making you laugh so much that you won’t even realize you’ve started to cry. Still, for a debut, this is a high-flying success about a boy who thought he could never grow up. More cleanly, about a Peter.
Club Kid is now playing in New York and Los Angeles and its distribution by A24 will expand throughout November.
-August
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