‘Club Kid’ Is a Surprisingly Worthy Addition to the ‘The Kid’ Genre

Who knew that a randy, drug-addled manchild with vampiric gay-clubbing hours and an 11am bedtime might actually make for a pretty wonderful father? Calling Club Kid an arrested-development dramedy or a Big Daddy knock-off is too reductive for Jordan Firstman’s dazzling debut, about a hard-charging party promoter named Peter Green (Firstman) who suddenly discovers that the 10-year-old kid suddenly dropped off at his apartment one blurry morning is actually his secret son Arlo (Reggie Absolom).

The unexpected-responsibility trope is a century-old cinematic chestnut — props to exemplars like Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 The Kid, a silent-film classic that’s equal parts side-splitting and tear-jerking; and the touching 1979 paternal comeuppance flick Kramer vs. Kramer, a mansplaining mea culpa where Dustin Hoffman goes from Neglectful Dad to Better Man in the span of a year.

Club Kid ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Directed by: Jordan Firstman
Written by: Jordan Firstman
Starring: Jordan Firstman, Reggie Absolom, Cara Delevigne, Diego Calva, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Colleen Camp, Vicki Pepperdine, Nigil Whyte, Eldar Isgandarov
Running time: 121 mins

Club Kid modernizes the dynamic, tucking that time-tested narrative device into downtown debauchery with outrageous alacrity. Turns out that, given the right amount of K-fueled nightclub sex, one of Peter’s shadowy encounters might have included a chatty British bird who’s horny for the super-fit — and super-high — boy toy. Cut to ten years and one tragic death later, when the woman’s best friend Edison (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) appears out of the blue with an English lad and a birth certificate sporting Peter’s name. “Point is, that’s your son,” she announces. “Yay!”

“I came inside of her?” Peter asks in disbelief about Arlo’s mom. “Yeah,” replies Edison. “Proper.”

Peter is already playing sort-of parent to boyish comic-relief roomie Nicky (Eldar Isgandarov) a queer mooch who spends his days trash-talking tweeners on MMO video games. His dream job: “Philosopher, low-key.” The arrival of shell-shocked Arlo means that Nicky has to go, so Peter pawns him off onto funky downstairs spinster neighbor Evelyn (Colleen Camp), an older woman with an impressively just-go-with-it attitude towards life who’s just happy to have the company.

Their kookily evolving screwball relationship turns into a running-gag highlight in a movie full of vividly etched supporting characters. Another one is Saffron (Saturn Risin9), the trans den mother to Peter’s gaggle of friends who teaches the Spotify-loving Arlo — a precocious musicologist in his own right — how to D.J. Even more poignant is Peter’s friend Devon (Nigil Whyte), a soft-spoken fellow rager who not shares not only Peter’s hedonistic attitudes but also his growing weariness over its shallow excesses. Dude just wants to hang platonically every so often, in between all those anonymous blowjobs.

Peter is completely unprepared to take care of Arlo (cue the kid popping up in an accidentally borrowed t-shirt that says “I Love Bjork and Bareback”), especially since he’s starting to stumble in his barely-lucrative vocation as a promoter. One too many coke-fueled late nights can lead to cat naps during midday meetings with the money men. “You’re a drug addict and you’ve lost the plot,” scolds bitchy business partner Sophie (Cara Delevigne), a longtime friend with her own heavy coke habit.

Almost broke and haplessly in over his head, Peter is the least qualified person for fatherhood. But the guileless, open-faced Arlo becomes almost like truth serum: this messy man becomes candid and vulnerable around him instead of bitter and resentful because of him. Peter opens himself up to Arlo, and that honesty unlocks the way for him to actually open up a whole new way of living — one that doesn’t renounce his past but evolves it into something even deeper.

To those who think becoming adult has to mean giving up all the things that make you interesting, Club Kid is the perfect rebuke. Firstman has manifested a miracle, the portrait of a decadent lifestyle rejected not out of moral repugnance but as a retirement of childish things. Peter absorbs the self-inflicted blows of his bacchanalian behavior in real time, slowly realizing how his eventual adoration of another person — his new son, his even newer boyfriend, his quasi-normie future — allows him to develop a self-respect he’s never felt.

But the adoration that Firstman expresses towards the LGBTQ community is the film’s greatest gift, a thrillingly sweet ode to alternate communities and alternative families. Club Kid isn’t an either/or zero-sum morality play that preaches repentance. It’s a joyous, wise expression of that hinge moment when juvenile self-indulgence can sometimes, against all odds, miraculously mature into self-actualization.