Cannes Review: With Club Kid, Jordan Firstman Announces Himself as a Director to Watch

It’s never wise to assume anything. Promotional materials doing the rounds before Club Kid‘s raucous Cannes premiere this week suggested a New York downtown scene answer to Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden, but Jordan Firstman’s funny, bittersweet, and tremendously moving directorial debut is as much a fresh reimagining of the stunted father subgenre that gave us everything from Kramer vs Kramer and Marriage Story to Adam Sandler’s Big Daddy. This is a movie that promises and delivers scenes of copious drug taking and gross-out comedy, but its third-act emotional payoff is as earned and devastating as the best of them.  

For fans who’ve followed Firstman’s career from Rotting in the Sun to I Love LA, this duck-to-water move behind the camera will come as a welcome surprise. It’s notable that the movie opened in Un Certain Regard, a sidebar the festival’s programmers have often used as a testing ground for movie stars looking to try their hand at the tiller for the first time. The difference with Firstman’s confident arrival is that it feels less the work of a dilettante than a natural. Just look at Club Kid‘s opening sequence, which opens on a fluid and immersive “oner” by cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra (who shot The Studio and The Last Black Man in San Francisco) that takes us from the front seat of an Uber all the way onto the dancefloor of Club Labor, where Peter Green (Firstman) and his entourage are greeted like Henry Hill at the Copacobana. It’s 2016 and the party’s just getting started. But soon the movie wakes up in the present day, a few thousand mornings after the morning after—an alerting choice and the first glimmer of Club Kid‘s larger ambitions.

The next comes a few scenes later with the abrupt arrival of an English lad named Arlo (Reggie Absolom), a ten-year-old from London who was conceived during a drug-fuelled moment between Peter and an English tourist on that fateful 2016 night. It’s here that Club Kid begins its unlikely journey into the lineage of those Hoffman and Sandler classics, becoming a story less about an aging party boy than a underqualified man coming face to face with the realities of fatherhood for the first time. Been-there, done-that? Perhaps. But no other movie in this subgenre has yet, to my knowledge, contained a scene in which father and son sing Ethel Cain in duet on piano, or the wisdom that fisting can be “lowkey spiritual,” or that a cocktail of G and alcohol is rarely (if ever) advisable.

Those moments and sharp-witted snatches of dialogue are just some of many things that make Club Kid such an engrossing and enjoyable watch—a movie with a clear sense of place and lived experience and packed to the brim with great music (Arthur Russell and Elliott Smith both feature) and personality. For the latter, there is Peter’s lively milieu, which boasts enough girls, gays, and theys to fill a movie twice this size. The movie of course revels in that world of joyful debauchery in its first half, which makes it doubly gratifying that, even after Arlo’s arrival and Peter’s inevitable decision to clean up his act, that the movie never once wags a finger at the life and people being left behind. When a bleary-eyed Peter tells his coked-up business partner Sophie (Cara Delevingne) that he’s turned to dealing drugs at the club partially to keep the community safe, there’s more than an ounce of truth to it—even if we know that, by the laws of screenwriting, those choices will inevitably come back to bite him. As with any well-worn genre piece, you’ll see story beats coming a mile away, but I welcomed their arrival with open arms.

Add to this a refreshing amount of real bustling streets and choice locations (a lunch scene at Balthazar here, a walk by the East River there, an always welcome shot of the city’s skyline from the window of a car at night) and you end up with one of the best (at least from this outsider’s perspective) New York movies of this scale since at least Past Lives. In a deceptively challenging lead role, Firstman locates an emotional register that feels perfectly in-step with his natural gifts as a comedic actor, and he’s backed by a supporting cast that includes Babylon’s hunky Diego Calva as a love interest, Hollywood veteran Colleen Camp as an eccentric neighbor, and—naturally—a who’s-who of the downtown scene (keep an eye out for Nick Pinkerton). Delevingne can chew scenery a bit much for comfort and I probably could have done without Arlo’s DJ subplot (which, as Peter notes, is indeed “lowkey corny”) but Club Kid looks every inch the work of a mature, gifted filmmaker with plenty to say and the guts to lay it all out.

Club Kid premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.