feels real from its opening spinning Uber shot to the ambiguous yet hopeful emotions it ends with, delivering authenticity rather than anything performative, one of the hardest things to pull off in modern filmmaking, especially with the stylized approach this movie demands. It offers as strong a first-film feel for New York as any movie ever has, a debut that understands its city deeply and its characters even more so, and immediately separates Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid from the endless stream of movies that walk the same streets, explaining why its post-Cannes bidding war was so intense. Club Kid is one of the greatest films of the year, carried by a magnificent Firstman performance and a directorial debut made with real passion and direction that truly speaks to its audience through every aspect that makes the film medium so beautiful, announcing a filmmaker who knows exactly what he wants and deserves to be championed for it. 

Peter is a washed-up underground party promoter whose entire existence runs on nightlife, momentum and the ability to never stop moving long enough to be looked at, and Club Kid spends its first stretch letting us live inside that world rather than explaining it from a distance. The arrival of Arlo, the ten-year-old son Peter did not know existed, reframes the whole story after a wonderful run of character and vibe setup, and the reframing lands precisely because Firstman made us care about the world before he detonated it. Cara Delevingne’s Sophie as Peter’s business partner and Diego Calva’s Oscar as Arlo’s social worker give the film its two opposing pressures, one pulling Peter back toward the life he built and one pushing him toward the life he now has no choice but to figure out. Once Arlo shares his own trauma, the plot arcs cleanly into its real subject, because from that moment forward both of them need something repaired, and neither one is remotely equipped to do the repairing alone. The film is enormously intentional about all of this and speaks to death and trauma in a genuinely smart way, never treating either as a device to move a scene along and never letting a joke—and there are many great ones—step on the thing sitting underneath it.

Adam Newport-Berra’s 35mm cinematography is the backbone of the whole film, and the camera is always intentional even inside the most stylized sequences, sitting clean on Peter or pushing right up on him depending on how much the movie is willing to let him hide in that moment. The fashion speaks its own language in every single scene and is very clearly a favorite instrument of Firstman’s, communicating who these people are and precisely what they are performing far more efficiently than any line of dialogue ever could. The lighting in the New York park sequence is used brilliantly, one of several moments where the film quietly proves that its visual confidence is not limited to clubs, neon and crowded rooms, and that Firstman can find the same specificity in daylight. After a drastic change in Peter’s circumstances, the film flips its entire mood coming out of a stunning, dark apartment scene, and the editing from Taylor Levy and Sofia Subercaseaux handles that pivot so well that a tonal shift that should feel abrupt instead registers as inevitable. Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score keeps a party pulsing somewhere underneath even the quietest scenes in this film, which is exactly the right instinct for a movie about a man who has organized his whole life around never having to sit still.