In a sea of very serious, sombre, 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.
You might 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, and while the multihyphenate—who has helmed, written and stars in this bleary-eyed romp—does initially play into your expectations of him, this is a film which does so much more, eventually sneaking up on you with a surprising emotional heft that is genuinely destabilising. 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 the 10-year-old Arlo (Reggie Absolom), fresh off the plane from London, who 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 passing. 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 enrol 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—that is comprised of rip-roaringly funny set pieces and several one-liners which I recalled hours later, while watching other films at Cannes, and found myself quietly chuckling to.
The New York he conjures feels textured and realised, 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.
If there’s anything to criticise in the writing, it’s perhaps that Peter is a little too idealised. Basically everyone around him is messy and flawed—including young Arlo, who displays a sudden burst of violence, which is never fully unpacked—but he takes to fatherhood like a duck to water. How can it change him overnight? How can it be this easy? Underneath all of Firstman’s bravado, you can sense a fear in presenting Peter as someone a little less affable, someone who might get things wrong in bigger and more damaging ways, someone who might even clash with Arlo.
But, despite any lingering reservations, Club Kid got me in its final moments, nailing me with a beautifully understated scene that delivered goosebumps and a lump in my throat. Like its hero, this film is hilarious, heartwarming, very silly, riotously entertaining, sometimes grating and prone to falling over into cliché, but it’s also pretty difficult not to love. If only every movie on the Croisette was this much fun.
Club Kid has just been acquired by A24 and will be in cinemas soon.
