A filmmaker brings their first feature to a film festival, arriving as a virtual unknown(-ish) and leaving as the belle of the ball, having brought audiences to tears and their feet, and endured a bidding war that ended with their debut fetching a seven-figure deal. It’s a tale as old as time, or at least as old as Sex, Lies and Videotape. We most often associate these types of Cinderella stories with Sundance, where literal overnight success was always just one life-changing screening at a high school auditorium away. (R.I.P., gala Eccles premieres.) We don’t normally link them to Cannes, though lord knows the prestigious French fest has minted more than its share of auteurs. They just usually tend toward future world-cinema heavy hitters, and not internet comedians best known for snarky IG missives, supporting roles on HBO shows, and penning choral odes to Laura Dern.
And yet! Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid is the closest thing to a seismic hit the king-making event has had this year, and will likely be the defining movie of the 2026 edition. Not that there haven’t been bright spots over the last week or so: Both Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden and Pawel Pawlikowski’s Fatherland are consensus best-of picks, and will likely split the top two competition prizes when everything is said and done on Friday. As for the American presence in this largely Hollywood-light year, veteran writer-directors James Gray and Ira Sachs both brought their A-games with Paper Tiger and The Man I Love, respectively. But from the moment Firstman’s story of an NYC scenester who reluctantly finds himself taking care of a tween premiered as part of the Un Certain Regard sidebar, it’s been the one film people have wanted to talk about and quote back to each other the most. Rarely has a breath of fresh air like this been so welcome on the Croisette.
Which is odd, given that “fresh” is the last word you’d use to describe the writer-director-star’s dramedy on paper. His party organizer, Peter Green, is the kind of professional clubgoer who’s seen more red-eyed sunrises than sunsets, happy to spend the bulk of his nights drugging, dancing, dealing coke and ketamine, hooking up with cute dudes, and drugging some more. He and his business partner, Sophie (Cara Delevingne), run a monthly must-attend night at Club Labor, and they’re on the cusp of getting an infusion of capital to expand their mini empire if Peter can quit getting high on his own supply. (Spoiler: He cannot.) If you’ve spent any time around downtown nightlife habitués, you’ve encountered more than a few Peters, those leviathans in tiny ponds who view life as one long DJ set and delusionally justify their addiction by claiming they’re just testing all those party favors “for the safety of my community.”
During one particularly hedonistic night in 2016, Peter finds himself in the club’s “dark room,” getting it on with the hottest guy on the dance floor. A British woman (Paris Petitjean), whom he dubs “Innit Babe” due to that being her rhetorical punctuation of choice, ends up inserting herself into their situation. Peter is not the least bit interested in boring hetero sex, but he’s pretty high, and this smoking fuckboi is like, “I wanna watch you fuck her,” and that’s kind of hot, so, you know… go with the flow and all that, right?
Cut to a decade or so later, and Peter is stuck in the same rut of endless nights out and rough morning-afters. His apartment in Chinatown is rent-controlled, thankfully, but the grind of using party as a verb, the legacy of irresponsible behavior, and the legion of burned bridges have begun to catch up with him. “You ever lose 10 years or so?” he asks his elderly downstairs neighbor — she’s played by living legend Colleen Camp, by the way, who’s the only actor capable of bragging that she appeared in movies named Death Game *and* Game of Death within the span of 18 months. Peter is teetering on the edge of a genuine existential crisis. It’s not, as the kids say, cute.
Speaking of kids: There’s a knock at Peter’s door one day, and remember that woman who was the third corner of his isosceles intimate encounter? Long story short, Peter is a dad. The shy, 10-year-old boy with the British accent and the anger issues is named Arlo (Reggie Absolom, amazing). He’s essentially stranded with his extremely shocked pops in New York, and while Peter would be the first person — and the second, and the third, etc. — to tell you he’s completely unqualified to raise a child, he’s left with zero options. So, he offloads his freeloading roommate (Eldar Isgandarov), lays off the narcotics, and tries to give the poor kid a semblance of stability while he figures out a more permanent solution.
Yeah, yeah, we know: It’s giving Big Daddy vibes. You get a good sense of where Club Kid — double-meaning title alert! — is headed, and you can’t be blamed for thinking that this will eventually turn into a parable of an immature man-child forced to grow TF up, and that both parties will teach each other life lessons along the way. Because guess what? That is indeed the destination. A bond will be established, a once-reluctant dad will embrace his makeshift paterfamilias role with renewed gusto, and a conflict regarding this guardianship will read its head. Laughter, tears, a romantic interest (courtesy of Diego Calva’s handsome child therapist), the whole shebang. Someone referred to the film’s poignant back half as Kramer vs. Kramer by way of Bushwick’s Boyfriend co-op, and there are worse descriptions for what Firstman is doing here.
But it’s not where the movie is going that holds its appeal so much as the way the triple-threat talent behind it gets you there. And his singular mix of edgy comedy and insular, in-the-know queer culture turns this crowd-friendly formula into something far more wounding and spiky. Firstman has established a sharp comic voice via his Instagram posts and upped his cult-favorite profile thanks to his celebrity stylist role on I Love LA, and while his brand of in-joke lingo is aimed at a specific audience, everyone but homophobes and haters are welcome to the party.
And if you’ve seen his short films, like 2018’s Men Don’t Whisper, in which a gay couple gets caught in a self-fueled crisis over masculinity codes, you already have a sense of the way Firstman can lace broad, biting humor with an aftertaste of bittersweetness. The shock here isn’t that he can mine hilarity from nicknames for club drugs and inappropriate cringe-comic situations. It’s the surprising tenderness he shows this cross-generational “damaged goods” duo, and the steady hand which ensures the emotional parts never become treacly or sickly-sweet. The movie forgoes an easy-target happy ending in favor of something more grounding and melancholy, yet still brings the uplift.
So of course Firstman’s ode to the underground queer-club world and offbeat parenting received a rapturous reception here. Even if this had not been an uncharacteristically lackluster Cannes fest, Club Kid still would have tapped into that sweet spot between character-driven dramedy and distinct, creator-driven sensibility that screams breakout hit. Of course he made a joke about showing his film in the sidebar’s resident DeBussy theater, and wanting to be “in De-Bussy” all the time. (It’s funnier if you hear it; see above clip.) And of course the film sparked an all-out showdown among distributors, with no less than Focus, Mubi, Searchlight, Netflix, and A24 reportedly vying for the title. The latter ended up having the $17 million last laugh, which feels appropriate — the movie taps into that distinct Dimes-Square-funky, fun-for-the-whole-hipster-family feel that A24 has turned into a movable feast. You can already picture the merch drops.
What the festival premiere of Club Kid has really done, besides gift Cannes audiences a deserved good time in the dark, is coronate Firstman as a first-rate, next-gen filmmaker. No one would mistake him for an Amerindie visionary, but he doesn’t need to be an Amerindie visionary. (Cannes also gave us one of those, to be fair, in the form of Jane Schoenbrun and their latest, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.) Like Eva Victor and her debut feature Sorry, Baby, this is a distillation of a viewpoint and a well-honed voice, one that’s filtered through a formula yet transcends familiarity and becomes something else entirely. To speak in the lexicon of Cannes: Madames, monsieurs, welcome to the cinéma du Firstman. Hopefully, this will be the first of many more to come.
