Club Kid

CLUB KID   ***

Jordan Firstman

2026

IDEA:  When he's left in charge of the 10-year-old son he never knew he had, a 30-something gay club promoter in New York City starts to pull himself out of his self-loathing.  

BLURB:  A lively, warmhearted celebration of queer community, Club Kid juices up a timeworn premise with cultural specificity, sassy charm, and an emotional candor one might not expect from a film whose first language is drug slang. Beginning from the flashy opening shot, with the camera doing multiple full rotations around an Uber packed with nightlife revelers, Firstman confidently announces his intent to display the energy and esprit de corp of New York City’s LGBTQ+ club culture. This is a world he clearly knows, because he’s both deeply admiring of it and aware of its seductive traps. For to lose yourself to the hedonism of pounding music and bodies, to say nothing of the alphabet soup of party drugs, is to potentially really lose yourself. Firstman’s Peter is driving headlong toward this intoxicating self-destruction in the first act of Club Kid, aided by strobing lights, crashing bass, and bags of coke. When the film introduces the catalyst for his redemptive self-actualization — not just a (gratuitously cute) kid, but the son he never knew he had — it initially seems like a trite device with a prescriptive purpose. Well, it is that, but it’s also more; what is predictable about how Arlo makes Peter grow up is joined by the unpredictability of the ways in which he inadvertently reshapes Peter’s ecosystem. A product of the club scene himself, Arlo facilitates enhanced connections and nontraditional couplings that prove transformative (one involves a fabulously dotty Colleen Camp, another a sultry Diego Calva). Meanwhile, Peter matures before our eyes, and Firstman brings Club Kid home with a performance that shifts almost imperceptibly from rascally insouciance to lump-in-the-throat solemnity. Like him, the film sobers up with the intrusion of reality, the raucous beat of the club moving inward to become the quieter but no less formidable beat of the heart.