In a sea of very serious, somber, largely joyless fare (my apologies to James Gray’s Paper Tiger, Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Sheep in the Box, and Marie Kreutzer’s Gentle Monster), there’s a rare bright spot to be found at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in the form of Jordan Firstman’s exuberant directorial debut, Club Kid.
While the multihyphenate—who has helmed, written, and stars in this bleary-eyed romp—does initially play into your expectations of him (you may be familiar with Firstman’s viral Instagram skits or know his buoyant acting work from I Love LA or Sebastián Silva’s Rotting in the Sun), this is a film that does so much more, eventually sneaking up on you with a surprising emotional heft that is genuinely destabilizing. It’s also a hell of a good time.
We open in the raucous, pre-pandemic New York City of 2016, as Rihanna’s “Sex with Me” blasts in an Uber taking professional partier Peter (Firstman), his best friend and business partner Sophie (a welcome return to the screen for Cara Delevingne), and their crew to one of their all-out monthly club nights. They’re raking in the dollars but letting loose at the same time—many drugs are consumed, questionable decisions made, and the details of their evening only half-remembered.
Cut to approximately a decade later, and not much has changed. Peter still runs his parties, wakes up in the middle of the afternoon, does lines for breakfast, bed rots, watches anime porn, has sex with men he meets on apps, and then turns up to important work meetings inconceivably high. Sophie, having had enough, threatens to cut him out of the business, but Peter is desperate to prove that he can take more responsibility. That’s when he’s handed the biggest one of his life so far: a former club night attendee turns up at his door with 10-year-old Arlo (Reggie Absolom), fresh off the plane from London, whom she claims is—wait for it—his son.
Apparently the product of a forgotten sexual encounter with a rowdy British woman—though he’s pretty convinced he’d never had sex with a woman before—Arlo is now Peter’s to look after, following his mother’s sudden death. It’s her friend who’s delivered him, saying Arlo’s mother always wanted him to have a relationship with his biological father. Peter tries to offload the kid, but when he can’t, this charming, odd-couple buddy comedy really takes off.
Peter, eternally allergic to forms and admin, tries to enroll him at school and get him healthcare; he cleans up his own act, at least a little; and Arlo is quickly (and remarkably wholesomely) absorbed into Peter’s world of late-night ragers, with the musically-inclined pre-teen even joining his newly found father at the club to try his hand on the decks.
Inevitably, reality soon intrudes, and it looks like the fairytale might have to end. Can Peter and Arlo stick together? And, perhaps more crucially, should they? What is actually best for Arlo?
Firstman balances the broad comedy and more touching earnestness elegantly, for the most part. There’s one soppy extended monologue and some slightly unnecessary and oversimplified unearthing of trauma, but those are quibbles rather than the meat of the offering—which is comprised of rip-roaringly funny set pieces and several one-liners that I recalled hours later, while watching other films at Cannes.
The New York he conjures feels textured and realized, the direction is confident, the music (from The White Lotus veteran Cristobal Tapia de Veer) pumping, the parties appropriately sticky and wild—perched perfectly on that tipping point between delicious and acrid—and a stellar and entirely believable supporting cast of regular partygoers does much to bring Firstman’s world to life. (Though Diego Calva, as Peter’s under-written love interest, surely deserved more.) Add to that Firstman’s own easy charisma and genuine, low-key connection with Absolom’s Arlo, and this is a film you want to hang out in, sprawled across the floor and staying up way too late, as if in a friend’s living room.
