Club Kid review – Jordan Firstman’s heartfelt comedy is irresistible | New York Film Festival 2026

IIn the dirty backstage of a Brooklyn warehouse, a group of glamorous, disheveled clubbers raise their voices in secular conversation. “What do we want? Drugs! When do we want them? Now!” So begins Club Kid, an irresistible ride through the New York club scene from comedian, actor and first-time director Jordan Firstman. A portrait of the importance of blood family and chosen family, it’s also one of the most haunting debuts of recent years.

Peter (Firstman) is the life of the party and has run his noisy Labor Club for over a decade. He always brings in the drugs, ends up with the best dressed crew and knows everyone. But the setbacks—the rotten days of animated porn, takeout, and self-loathing—don’t get any easier, and it squanders the party’s opportunities to take it to the next level. “You’re a fucking child,” his partner Sophie (Cara Delevingne in her best performance yet) spits after arriving at a lunch meeting with potential investors straight from the rave.

Everything changes when Leonora, a British party girl he met 10 years earlier, shows up at his door with a 10-year-old girl named Arlo who she claims is her child. It’s true, Peter remembers, there was this trio in the darkroom ten years ago. (“Did I come inside her?” he asks incredulously. “Yeah, that’s true,” Leonora confirms.) Arlo’s mother recently died, and Peter finds himself responsible for the child. After a few lapses in judgment, like when he neglects to hide his “I love Björk and bareback” T-shirt from his new protégé, Peter quickly gets used to Arlo and the pair settle into a gentle rhythm, bonding over a love of music, exploring the city, and spending cozy nights together while Peter turns on his stove for what feels like the first time in years.

After initially setting strict limits on his nightlife friends’ interactions with Arlo (“Don’t talk about dicks or drugs,” he hisses), Peter finds a way to share his life with his son. He takes Arlo to buy records at the East Village’s landmark A1 and introduces him to a DJ friend named Saffron (the luminous Saturn Risin9) who teaches the kid how to use the mixing decks. It’s the kind of situation that seems too good to be true, and it’s not easy for father and son, with bigger challenges ahead.

Firstman has held his own on screen before, particularly in the twisted comedy Rotting in the Sun, but here he’s magnetic as a good-natured train wreck that you can’t help but root for. Queer life in New York can be complicated, and Firstman lets it be. There’s an unusual warmth that Club Kid gives to its characters (the glow of its physical film also makes it physical) that extends to its urban setting, even though you can practically smell the hot garbage outside Peter’s Lower East Side apartment. To underline the reality, Firstman cast nightlife personalities such as Alaska Riley and Miss Benny as sassy stage queens, in addition to Diego Calva (Narcos) as a social worker and confidante and the brilliantly natural Reggie Absolom as Arlo.

There’s a lesser, dumber version of this movie that would flatten its story into a lazy redemption arc proclaiming that clubbing is a waste of time when parenting is actually worth it. Unfortunately, that’s also the impression given by the film’s trailer, which makes it seem like an Oscar-worthy morality tale about how a cute middle schooler teaches a wayward club rat what really matters in life (yikes). Although I found the ending of the film a little too neat, Club Kid truly resonates as a love letter to queer nightlife. because he refuses to sugarcoat his unsavory sides. Normally you have to go to European arthouses to get that kind of adult attitude towards partying (I thought about gems like Victoria and Eden more than once). While the film isn’t afraid to look the problems of nightlife in the face, it also shows why it can be magical: the cab rides blaring to Rihanna’s beat, the romance of surrendering to the beat, the bodies intertwining as the sun peeks through the windows.

Club Kid is a riot. I can’t think of a sight gag or scripted quip in the picture that doesn’t land. (The man sitting next to me doubled over so violently after a joke about aspiring queer philosophers that I almost called an ambulance.) It also speaks to the importance of filmmakers telling the stories they know, and knowing that the bathroom bumps and post-party blur that extends into the afternoon are worthy of 35-millimeter film. On stage at the film’s premiere at Lincoln Center, no one seemed more surprised than Firstman himself, but I wasn’t surprised to see him receive a standing ovation; Club Kid is a gem that couldn’t have come from anyone else.