‘Club Kid’ Review: Jordan Firstman Made the Best New York Movie in Years

Firstman’s directorial debut brilliantly balances between hysterical and devastating, and left a sold-out TIFF crowd in tears and roaring aplause.

There is a shot about ninety seconds into Club Kid that told me everything I needed to know.

The camera starts in the front seat of an Uber, follows Jordan Firstman’s Peter out of the car, through a door, past a bouncer, down a hallway and onto a dancefloor where Rihanna is already playing, and it does all of it without cutting.

It is the kind of entrance filmmakers attempt when they want you to know they are serious. What makes it work is not the technical flex. It is that by the time Peter turns and grins into the lens, you understand exactly who this man is, what this room means to him, and why he has organized his entire life around getting back into it.

I saw Club Kid at TIFF, and I have not stopped thinking about it since.

Firstman writes, directs and stars, which is usually a warning sign. Three hats means three chances to indulge yourself. What happens here is the opposite. This is the rare debut where the filmmaker seems to understand his own worst tendencies better than his critics do, and builds a movie that metabolizes them instead of hiding them.

Peter is a party promoter in New York, coasting on charm and cocaine and a shrinking reserve of relevance. He is funny in the way that people who are terrified of silence are funny.

Firstman has spent years playing versions of this guy in viral videos and supporting roles, and there was every reason to expect the film to be a feature-length extension of that persona. Instead the character keeps opening up. By the second act you are not watching a comedian do a bit. You are watching a man who has spent a decade avoiding a conversation with himself.

The plot turn is the oldest one in the book. A messy encounter years ago produced a child, that child’s mother has died, and now a ten-year-old named Arlo is standing in Peter’s apartment expecting to be raised. Baby Boom has done this. Big Daddy has done this. Half of Judd Apatow’s filmography has done this.

What matters is not that the story is familiar. What matters is that Firstman refuses to use it as a correction.

That distinction is the whole film. Most movies of this shape treat the arrival of a child as a verdict on the life that preceded it, a cosmic notice that the party is over and adulthood has won. Club Kid declines. It never sneers at the world Peter is being pulled out of, never frames his friends as cautionary tales, never suggests that the nightlife he built was a waste.

Instead it argues something gentler and far more interesting: that Peter had simply outgrown a room he was still showing up to every night, and that he needed a reason to notice.

Reggie Absolom plays Arlo, and the kid is remarkable. He avoids the two traps child actors fall into, precocious wisdom and manufactured vulnerability, and instead plays a boy who has recently lost his mother and is being polite about it. The scenes between him and Firstman have a loose, improvisational quality that made me forget I was watching a movie.but rather a real father son interaction.

There’s a belief that movies are machines that generate empathy, and that the ones that work best put you inside a life you have not lived. The 2016 New York club scene is something I did live in, and remember fondly. But the circumstances that follow here are so specific, so particular to these two people, that Firstman had the entire audience feeling every bit of the love and despair in Peter and Arlo’s journey. By the end of Club Kid I understood exactly what it costs to be that guy, and exactly what it costs to stop.

The city is the other lead performance here.

Adam Newport-Berra shot this on 35mm, much of it inside real parties with real crowds, and the result is the best-looking New York film I have seen in years. He does not shoot the clubs the way clubs are usually shot, from a distance, in wides, treating bodies as texture. His camera gets close enough to be rude. You are not observing the party. You are at it, slightly too warm, slightly too loud, someone’s elbow in your back.

Then the sun comes up and the film finds another register entirely, and the same photography that made the nightclub feel airless makes a walk along the East River feel like the most spacious thing in the world. There are shots of the skyline from a car window at night that made my chest hurt.

This is a movie that loves New York the way you love a city you already miss while you are still standing in it.

Firstman surrounds himself well. Diego Calva is charming and grounded as a social worker who becomes a love interest. Colleen Camp is very funny as a neighbor. Kirby Howell-Baptiste does a lot with limited screen time. Cara Delevingne goes big, occasionally bigger than the film around her, though her instincts are sound.

The real find is Eldar Isgandarov as Nicky, a squatter houseguest who plays like a millennial twink Kramer, bursting in unannounced and providing comic relief every single time he is on screen. He gets most of the film’s sharpest lines and delivers them like he is surprised to be in the room at all.

Carmen Cuba cast this, and the ensemble is stacked with genuine downtown faces rather than actors doing an impression of them. That authenticity is not a small thing. It is the difference between a film about a scene and a film made from inside one.

The third act contains a courtroom sequence built as a single unbroken take, and it is the moment the movie stops being promising and becomes accomplished.

Firstman has to carry everything the previous ninety minutes has constructed, in one shot, without a cut to bail him out. He carries it. I watched a filmmaker discover his own range in real time. It’s truly remarkable and incredibly endearing.

Is the film too easy on its protagonist? A little. Peter kicks a serious drug habit with less friction than the real world grants anybody, and the movie’s theory that his bad behavior stems from not liking himself very much is a tidier explanation than the behavior probably deserves. Firstman is generous with Peter in a way he might not be with someone else.

I noticed this. I did not care.

Because the generosity is the point. But more than that, Peter speaks to Arlo with a directness that most parents avoid, and the ones who don’t avoid it are the ones who actually get through.

That is the film’s quietest and best idea. Club Kid  is a film made by someone who has clearly been written off, made about people who get written off, arguing that a life can turn without the previous version of it needing to be repudiated. Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score carries that argument, and when Arthur Russell drifts into the final act, the whole thing achieves a kind of melancholy grace I did not see coming from the guy who made those videos.

A great movie does not have to be original. It has to be alive.

Club Kid is alive in every frame. It is funny without being cruel, sincere without being soft, and formally confident in a way first features almost never are. It is a New York movie that earns comparison to the best of them, a debut that announces a real filmmaker, and a story about fatherhood that finds something new to say by refusing to moralize.

I loved it without reservation. It is the most purely joyful experience I had at TIFF, and I suspect it will be the film from this festival I return to most.

Rating: ★★★★★

That’s A Wrap | Club Kid

CREDITS

Festival Premiere: TIFF 51 Special Presentations
Release Date: November 6, 2026
Distributor: A24
Writer-Director: Jordan Firstman
Cast: Jordan Firstman, Cara Delevingne, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Diego Calva, Reggie Absolom, Colleen Camp, Eldar Isgandarov, Miss Benny, Saturn Risin9, Vicki Pepperdine
Cinematography: Adam Newport-Berra
Editing: Taylor Levy, Sofia Subercaseaux
Music: Cristobal Tapia de Veer
Casting: Carmen Cuba
Production Design: Stephen Phelps
Costume Design: Emily Costantino
Producers: Alex Coco, Galen Core, Michael Bloom, Ryan Heller
Rated: R
Runtime: 2 hours 2 minutes

Watch The Trailer Below:

Joanthan P. Moustakas

Jonathan P. Moustakas founded The Cinema Group in 2020 during the challenges of the pandemic, after losing the vital ability to find community in theaters and escape through the captivating magic of cinema. Feeling profoundly cut off from the vibrant film community he cherished, he sought to create a welcoming home for dedicated cinema fans while providing engaging, daily curated content that resonates with their passions. Years later, The Cinema Group has blossomed from a small collective of loyal fans into a thriving brand that reaches millions of audiences every month across a diverse array of platforms and mediums.

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