Jordan Firstman’s Winsome, Clever Dramedy

The writer and actor Jordan Firstman — known for viral web videos, for films like Rotting in the Sun, for the television series I Love LA — is an acquired taste. He often plays into a certain abrasive, ditzy stereotype about gay men who live in big cities: sex-crazed but loveless, self-conscious and self-aggrandizing at once, literate but dumb, politically aware and yet eager to transgress supposed civility. As a nascent star, he’s been pretty divisive, both embraced for being a gadfly who actually puts in the work and scorned for what is viewed as brash over-confidence. 

Firstman’s debut directorial effort, Club Kid, shrewdly acknowledges those garish personality tics, which have both endeared and repulsed audiences. Firstman plays Peter, a drug-happy party promoter tripping the light fantastic in New York. He and his gregarious friends, a queer melange of DJs and scenesters and enablers, have seized a corner of the city’s nightlife and turned it into something like a livelihood. In Peter’s case, his work provides a neat cover for what appears to be a pretty serious dependence on cocaine and other narcotics. But he’s not hurting anyone besides himself, so what’s the harm really? 

In its loud, grating first scenes, Club Kid deliberately tries patience. It succeeds in both seducing us into the party and making us want to go home to bed. We can sense that a downfall is coming — Peter is just too rude and hedonistic to not be careening toward some sort of comeuppance — but it’s unclear how hard, how nihilistic Firstman is willing to get. 

To our surprise, Firstman instead steers his film toward one of cinema’s most cherished, and some might say hoary, conventions. The story abruptly jumps forward about a decade, and the consequences of a messy dark-room sexual encounter are suddenly staring Peter in the face in the form of a 10-year-old boy he’s told is his son. Thus, Club Kid manifests many a gay guy’s nightmare: a rare (singular, even) dalliance with a woman has resulted in a child and, thus, the death of fun. 

Peter greets the arrival of this boy, named Arlo (Reggie Absolom), with just that kind of panic. He’s been asked to take custody following the death of Arlo’s mother, making this something of a Baby Boom situation, albeit with a tween rather than an infant. Conscious of predecessors like that one and C’mon C’mon, Firstman endeavors to figure out how the structural demands of this well-worn accidental-parent narrative might graft onto a portrait of solipsistic gay-millennial malaise. 

Club Kid, a winning and clever film, does some Hollywood airbrushing to make things blend together. Peter acknowledges that he has issues with drugs, and thus promptly quits them (mostly, anyway), a considerable smoothing out of how a significant life change like that would likely play out in real life. But Firstman and Absolom have such a lively, natural rapport that one doesn’t really mind the only-in-the-movies ease with which they adapt to one another. And it’s certainly a relief to settle into such a cozy, familiar plot after the thump and stress of the film’s beginnings. 

Though the film gradually shifts into drama, Firstman is careful not to forget the comedy. He gets especially good results from actor and model Eldar Isgandarov as Firstman’s squatter houseguest Nicky, a curious, elfin creature who gives many of the film’s funniest line readings. Firstman has populated his film well, making good use of Isgandarov, Colleen Camp, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, and Diego Calva as a seriously sexy social-worker/love interest. It’s a merry, disarmingly friendly ensemble, all orbiting around Firstman’s offhandedly charming lead performance. 

Might there be a hint of something vain, or self-flattering in that charm? Sure. The film exists partly as an advertisement for Firstman’s softer side. He gives Peter little friction in his quest to be better; parenting skills come quickly and naturally, sprung out of an innate decency — which Firstman is perhaps arguing exists in him as well, haters be damned. But many actor-directors in the past have given themselves just such a spit-shine, so we probably can’t begrudge Firstman for doing the same. He does do some awfully convenient exculpatory psychological analysis, though. I maybe don’t fully buy that all of Peter’s bad behavior can be explained away by, and forgiven because of, his repeated insistence that he just doesn’t like himself very much. There’s some deflection happening there. 

But Club Kid isn’t really a whitewashed vanity project. It’s a confident, exciting directorial debut, stylish in an unobtrusive way and agreeably paced. It is cognizant of at least some reality, too: Firstman eventually brings the homey fantasy back down to earth, recognizing that bureaucracy would inevitably come to bear on this quirky little found family. 

Peter might be matured, and humanized, by the imposition of fatherhood, but the movie doesn’t attach exactly the same moral weight to that shift as do movies like Raising Helen and Big Daddy, or the sneakily conservative urgings of some of Judd Apatow’s films. Club Kid doesn’t condemn the world that Peter is suddenly snatched out of, it just makes the more personal argument that it was an environment to which Peter had grown particularly ill-suited. 

I don’t think the film is a public renouncement of Firstman’s social milieu, a “guys, haven’t we grown out of this?” bit of smarm from someone trying to give his image a mainstream polish. But it is, maybe, suggesting to those who might be lost in the party that life can be led with more — and I apologize for using this particular buzz word — intentionality. It’s a call to consciousness, really, a gentle urging that slowing down is not giving up, that cool is not the only currency, and that what happens in the dark room may not always stay there. Something to keep in mind as another Pride approaches, perhaps.