Club Kid is 2026’s most astonishing debut – it broke my heart

The bass is blaring, the club lights are flashing, you’ve just done a bump…. and there’s a strange 10-year-old kid at your doorstep calling you dad.

That’s the premise of Jordan Firstman’s – the mind behind edgy hit-and-miss comedy I Love LA – directorial debut, in which he stars as a spiralling New York party promoter, Peter Green, whose hollow life has become a drug-fueled rinse and repeat.

Firstman’s biggest gamble is also his brightest idea, setting him up as a bold filmmaker with his first feature. He takes his time and trusts the audience is there for the ride.

The movie opens as you would expect. Peter arrives at Club Labor (his sticky-floored home away from home) to woo some patrons, snort some coke and seduce the cutest guy in the room.

In a drug-induced haze, however, he finds himself in a questionable threesome with a British woman whom he and his friend had jokingly nicknamed ‘Innit babes’.

Flash-forward 10 years and Peter is living the same life, but with considerably less pep in his step. Firstman could have rushed this set-up and shoehorned in the surprise kid near the very start to drive the plot forward, but instead he lets us sit with Peter’s moroseness.

His relationship with his business partner, Sophie (Cara Delevigne), is in tatters; his days have no beginning and no end, and his eclectic (and enabling) friends are perhaps the most meaningful thing he has left.

By the time 10-year-old Arlo (Reggie Absolom) enters his life in a whirl of chaos, confusion and tragedy, we have become intimately acquainted with Peter’s washed-out life and all the regrets he lives with.

Both father and son have found one another at the moment they most need, in the kind of serendipity you only ever see in the movies but remains as convincing as ever.

Jordan and Reggie build a tender and beautiful chemistry over the course of the rest of the movie. The journey they go on from reluctant roommates, both searching for an unconditional connection to family, who love one another in all their messiness, is a delight to watch play out.

Among the heartfelt moments, there’s a good dose of comedy in the electric, but clashing, dynamics between Arlo and Peter’s worlds.

Not to mention the brilliant side characters like an aspiring queer philosopher from Azerbaijan, Nicky (Eldar Isgandarov) and his effervescent downstairs neighbour Evelyn (Colleen Camp).

What makes this movie all the more endearing is that it doesn’t lose its soul. We don’t watch Peter cash in his life as a messy gay man who spends his hours at the club to be a stern single father who’s disavowed this lifestyle.

Instead, there’s a cacophony of life that exists in the blurry in-between, where you can keep the joy and laughter and say goodbye to the vices that got you through your youth and no longer serve a purpose.

Perhaps my main critique is the slightly messily executed romance (I won’t give away much more than that). While well acted and sweet enough, it detracted from time spent with Arlo and the difficulties he’s facing.

It offered an insight into how much healing he’d done to be able to open himself up to romantic love, but there wasn’t enough space in the movie to seamlessly incorporate it.

By the end, Peter and Arlo, and the fragile kinship they’ve built, are holding your heart in their hands. Whatever hardships they face squeeze it, and the triumphs they experience make it soar.

Ultimately, this is a movie about hope even in the darkest of times, the beauty of queer love and found family, and how nothing is ever black-and-white, and that’s exactly where the magic lies.

It has me excited to see what Firstman does next.

Club Kid premiered at BFI London Film Festival. It will arrive in UK cinemas on January 8, 2026.