Miss Benny and Jordan Firstman in Club Kid. Photograph: Courtesy of A24 View image in fullscreen Miss Benny and Jordan Firstman in Club Kid. Photograph: Courtesy of A24 First look review New York film festival 2026 Review Club Kid review – Jordan Firstman’s heartfelt comedy is irresistible New York film festival: the actor impresses with a directorial debut about a club rat who discovers he is father to a 10-year-old boy
Prefer the Guardian on Google I n a grungy backroom of a Brooklyn warehouse, a group of glamorously dishevelled clubbers raise their voices in a secular chat. “What do we want? Drugs! When do we want them? Now!” So begins Club Kid , an irresistible helter-skelter ride through the New York club scene from the 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 bewitching debuts in recent years.
Read more Peter (Firstman) is the life of the party and has been running his raucous Club Labor for over a decade. He always gets the drugs in, rolls up with the best-dressed crew and knows everyone. But the comedowns – bed-rot days of anime porn, takeout and self-loathing – aren’t getting any easier, and he is screwing up opportunities for the party to get to the next level. “You’re a fucking child,” spits his business partner Sophie ( Cara Delevingne in her best performance yet) after he shows up to a lunch meeting with potential investors straight from the rave.
Everything changes when Leonora, a British party girl who he met 10 years earlier, shows up at his door with a 10-year old named Arlo that she claims is his child. Right, Peter remembers, there was that darkroom threesome a decade ago. (“I came inside her?” he asks in disbelief. “Yeah, proper,” Leonora confirms.) Arlo’s mum recently died, and Peter finds himself responsible for the kid. After some lapses in judgment, such as when he neglects to hide his “I love Björk and bareback” T-shirt from his new charge, Peter quickly warms to Arlo and the pair settle into a sweet rhythm, bonding over a love of music, exploring the city and spending cozy nights together as Peter switches on his stove for what seems like the first time in years.
After initially setting strict boundaries to his nightlife friends’ interactions with Arlo (“No talk about dicks or drugs,” he hisses), Peter finds a way to share his life with his son. He brings Arlo record shopping in the East Village staple A1, and introduces him to a DJ friend named Saffron (the luminous Saturn Risin9) who teaches the kid to use mixing decks. It’s the kind of set-up that feels too good to be true, and it is not plain sailing for father and son, with greater challenges to come.
Read more Firstman has held his own on-screen before, particularly in the twisted comedy Rotting in the Sun , but he is magnetic here as a good-natured trainwreck that you can’t help rooting for. Queer life in New York can be messy, and Firstman lets it be. There’s an uncommon warmth that Club Kid bestows to its characters (the glow of its physical film stock renders that physical, too) that extends to its urban setting, even as you can practically smell the hot garbage outside Peter’s Lower East Side apartment. To underline the realness, Firstman cast nightlife personalities such as Alaska Riley and Miss Benny as saucy queens of the scene in addition to Diego Calva (Narcos) as a social worker and confidant and the brilliantly natural Reggie Absolom…