Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Jason Adams | Film | October 3, 2026
The buzz is coming in piping hot on A24’s gay dad dramedy Club Kid out of its premieres at Cannes and Telluride and TIFF and now here with the New York Film Festival—like many of its characters, this movie is making the rounds. Starring and written and directed by Jordan Firstman, a comedian with a big online presence who branched out to proper acting via memorable roles in Sebastián Silva’s hysterically meanspirited Rotting in the Sun and Rachel Sennott’s HBO series I Love L.A., Club Kid represents a huge swing at seriousness for Firstman, whose whole schtick up til now has been a deep millennial unseriousness.
And happily he (mostly) connects—while the tell-tale signs of a first-time filmmaker are abundant (especially in its script) this is a surprisingly adorable movie about ketamine and kid-rearing, not perhaps always in that order. The real shock here comes from Firstman as a performer, though—the question of how in he was on the joke with regards to his obnoxious persona is definitively answered here, as he turns in a flawlessly funny and deeply moving performance playing a party-boi suddenly confronted with paternity. He’s who we expect him to be in the film’s first act only to strenuously unravel all of that for the rest of the movie, and as far as that’s concerned it’s a proper success.
If you’ve seen the series Search Party or The Other Two then you should have an idea of who the artist formerly known as “Jordan Firstman” was, since he wrote for both of those series and the bitchy too-online Capital-H Homosexual he represented was deeply ingrained in both of those shows’ DNAs. (To a lesser extent Hacks as well.) And in Club Kid that whole situation is right up in our faces from the film’s opening moments as he we meet his character Peter, a live-wire NYC party promoter who only takes a breath from rattling off gay slang gibberish long enough to do another line of whatever powder or pill or penis has lined up in front of him.
Sex, drugs, and house-music abound in Club Kid’s breathless first act, and it’s every ounce as exhilarating slash exhausting as it needs to be—there’s a whiff of Queer Safdie Bros to be had; you wouldn’t be surprised for Peter’s bathtub to suddenly fall through the floor, or to see Adam Sandler getting his head blown off in the background. (And one of the dolls who make up Peter’s party pack would no doubt drop a one-liner that’d kill at that moment, too.)
Instead this all comes to a head when a pair of random British party-girls throw themselves at Peter during a humdinger of a hop he’s throwing. A Kinsey 6 he’s not at all interested, but a couple of hours and thirty pounds of drugs later when one of the lovely London lasses slips in between Peter and the dude he’s tricking with in the anything-goes back-room, well one thing leads to another and wham bam smash-cut to a dozen-plus years later and out spills a beautiful baby plot.
Not exactly the most original plot mind you, as “not-ready-for-primetime adult male must learn to be ready immediately when a kid drops in his lap” is the well-worn plot of everything from Steve Guttenberg to Adam Sandler (hey there he is again) comedies of decades past. Still the magic is all in the baking of the familiar ingredients, and Firstman whips up a sweet enough dish with Club Kid.
So yes obviously Peter’s one night-fling-ette with that British girl resulted in a bouncing British baby boy. Add that dozen-plus-years and the son is a tween, one named Arlo (Reggie Absolom), and that’s right about the time when said son shows up on Peter’s doorstep, his mom having just died by her own hand. [Insert screeching record sound here.]
Arlo’s delivered to Peter via the mom’s best friend, a whirlwind of her own named Madison (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) who definitely means well—there’s nobody else to take Arlo but Arlo’s mum’s abusive ex, and nobody wants that—but in action she really just intends to drop Arlo off and run. And despite Peter’s protestations he and Arlo do hit it off rather immediately—it’s just that here is where you start to see the lines that Firstman’s script is tracing in, as people’s behavior starts to really seem more like Movie Behavior than genuine.
Peter might be at an emotional impasse when he Arlo steps into his life—his party business with his best friend Sophie (a perfectly cast Cara Delevingne) is falling apart and, a decade older, the lines are now more around his eyes than they are up his nose—but his actions here, as he decides to go ahead and wing it as a dad out of nowhere, strain the definition of “immature.” Firstman does attempt to wrestle with the realities of what Peter’s taken on, but when you find yourself thinking about Paris Hilton buying her dog to match her shoes you’ve maybe strained the audience’s sympathies past their breaking point. (Or the situation’s believability, at least.)
The biggest flaw though is Arlo himself (through no fault of Absolom’s very sweet performance) as the character never coalesces into a complete human being more than a plot device—calling him a Manic Pixie Dream Kid seems especially apt. He arrives on Peter’s doorstep basically a perfect package, a thoughtful and funny kid who seems to have no issues even though he was raised in an abusive home surrounded by suicidal drug-addicts. We see very little of his trauma with regards to his freshly deceased mother, save one scuffle with another kid in the park—a moment that only seems to exist so a sexy therapist (Diego Calva) with his shit together can find his way into Peter’s otherwise drug-fueled life, giving him a happily blown-out back to finally properly live for.
Still, for all of its scattered hambone bits, Club Kid remains immensely entertaining and shockingly sweet, and Firstman really delivers on the dramatic moments his character and we the audience are wrung through in the film’s final act. You’ll definitely think of better movies like Kramer vs Kramer and C’mon C’mon, but with Absolom given far less of a full character to play than Justin Henry and Woody Norman were, Club Kid never quite manages to attain the Gay Daddy Greatness that it’s aiming for. But you keep going, Gay Daddy Firstman. We’re here for whatever you’ve got next and that is in itself unexpected.
Club Kid is currently playing the New York Film Festival. It opens in theaters November 6th.
