Club Kid opens with the best shot in the whole movie: a rotating pan that shows the inside of an Uber ride. Peter (Jordan Firstman) and his friends pile in, on their way to a night out at a club, and start singing along to the song at the top of their lungs.
Mostly the shot shows the ecstasy of the city at night and the glamour of being out with a group of friends. But every fifteen seconds or so, it pans past the Uber driver again, who is quietly working while a surely irritating scene plays out around him. This shot grounds the movie in the externalities of the club scene in a visual way – the clubs and partying are shot with style and panache, but the movie is always clear that somebody is paying the price.
Though the Uber driver isn’t seen again, Club Kid carries this idea forward through the character of Arlo (Reggie Absalom), Peter’s 10-year-old son who is dropped off at his New York apartment unexpectedly. Peter is unaware that he has a son, or even that he has ever slept with a woman, as Arlo was conceived during a blackout night on MDMA. But while Peter is first resistant to entering into Arlo’s life, Peter’s body and spirit have taken a beating during his decade plus in the club scene, and he soon finds that Arlo represents a new opportunity for purpose, and he decides to raise Arlo while trying to scrounge up enough cash to get by.
Until this film, Jordan Firstman was primarily known as an actor and a comedian, and so it isn’t particularly surprising that his directorial debut is very funny. What is surprising, though, is that Club Kid takes a drama-first approach – it is much more akin to something like Anora than the Firstman-starring series I Love LA. But when Club Kid does go for laughs, they are some of the best of the year, not only because Firstman’s sense of humor is so finely tuned but also because the laughs are surrounded by a more grounded emotional and stylistic work.
However, that’s not to say that there aren’t any warts in this directorial debut. There are a couple of stylistic choices that I found off-putting, particularly in its overuse of close-ups for nearly entire scenes at times, and other shot choices that betray a lack of understanding of the fundamentals of film grammar. But the film proceeds with such energy and passion that it is easy to forgive a few misfires and simply get swept up in all the excitement.
One other major strength of the movie is how well thought out the story beats are. The film resists having Peter fuck up in obvious ways, though it would create easy laughs and easy drama. But it would be antithetical to the core message of the film. Peter’s life is very quickly transformed when Arlo enters his life, but good intentions aren’t enough when his social circle is full of bad influences, and there are no role models to help. It’s so easy to make 99% of the right decisions and still have the remaining 1% come back to bite you.
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