Sunrise With a Son, Jordan Firstman Brings Club Kid to Lincoln Center
The comedian's Cannes breakout about a Brooklyn party promoter and the boy who changes his weekends plays the New York Film Festival
The suit was black and the tie was thin. On Saturday night Jordan Firstman stood in front of the step and repeat at Alice Tully Hall looking sharp enough for a wedding. Inside, the 64th New York Film Festival was about to show his first feature, a movie about a man whose Saturday nights look nothing like that.
Club Kid has been on the road since May. It premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, where A24 reportedly paid $17 million for it after a bidding war, according to The Hindu. It went on to Toronto, and now it has come home. Cara Delevingne, who plays his business partner, and the performer Miss Benny, who is also in the cast, walked the carpet on Saturday too. A24 opens the film in theaters on November 6.
The Party Called Labor
Firstman wrote it, directed it, and stars in it. He plays Peter, a gay New York party promoter. The film opens in 2016, when Peter and his friend Sophie, played by Delevingne, launch a weekly party they call Club Labor. One very high night he goes home with a British tourist, which is not his usual type.
Then the movie jumps ten years. Peter is still out until sunrise, still doing far too many drugs, and the act has stopped being charming. Then a boy named Arlo turns up. He is ten, he is from London, his mother has died, and Peter is his father. As the New York Post's Johnny Oleksinski put it, some online reduced the premise to a gay Big Daddy when the trailer came out. He called the finished film one of the best of the year, compared it to Anora, and singled out how much it knows about Brooklyn nightlife.
Reggie Absolom plays Arlo, and both the Post and Film Threat single him out. The rest of the cast includes Diego Calva, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Colleen Camp, Vicki Pepperdine and Eldar Isgandarov, who plays Peter's roommate Nicky. Cristóbal Tapia de Veer, who scored The White Lotus, wrote the music. The film runs just over two hours and carries an R rating for drug content, sex and language, which will surprise nobody who has stayed for the afters.
"You look around, and you see zombies where it should be a community." Jordan Firstman
A Map of the Afters
What critics keep coming back to is how specific the film is about the city. At Film Threat, Andy Howell wrote that it feels rooted in a particular time and place, the world of New York's queer parties. Far Out's Liam Gaughan noted that for a movie set mostly inside that scene, it is not especially raunchy, and he found it sweet, sometimes close to too sweet. He also thought the last half hour runs long.
Firstman has been open about where it came from. Before Cannes, he told IndieWire that the mid-2010s felt like the moment European club habits crossed over to American gay nightlife, and he walked through how the drugs on the floor changed year by year after the pandemic. In his telling, the change left some rooms feeling less like a community than they used to. The film, by most accounts, does not judge anyone for it. It simply asks what happens to a man whose whole life is built around the next party when someone small needs him to be home.
It simply asks what happens to a man whose whole life is built around the next party when someone small needs him to be home.
From the Phone to the Big Screen
Plenty of people know Firstman from his Instagram impressions videos, the absurd, rapid-fire bits that made him famous online. He has also written and acted for television, including Search Party, The Other Two and I Love LA, and he played a version of himself in Sebastián Silva's Rotting in the Sun, which premiered at Sundance in 2023. Club Kid is his first time behind the camera on a feature.
He told IndieWire that he went into this project done with trying to please people. "I didn't want to win anyone over anymore," he said. That may be why it seems to be winning people over anyway.
The festival has already given this season a few big New York nights, from its opening on celluloid to Cameron Winter's piano at Carnegie Hall on film. Club Kid is the one about what the city feels like at 6 a.m. on a Sunday, when the party is over and the day is not. On November 6, the rest of the country gets to see it. New York will be checking whether the parties look right.
