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- L.A.-based viral comic Jordan Firstman steps behind the camera with ‘Club Kid,’ which follows a queer New York party promoter blindsided by unexpected fatherhood.
- A real screenwriter and director emerges with Firstman’s feature debut, a Cannes knockout coming from A24. But getting there required a pivot to the heart.
- Shot on 35mm with a cast including Cara Delevingne and Diego Calva, ‘Club Kid’ is a universal portrait of two lost souls finding each other at the right time.
Just a block up the hill from the Silver Lake Reservoir on one of those secluded streets that feels like the L.A. of the 1970s sits a dark-wood-shingled triplex of apartments. It both is and isn’t a Neutra house. The current occupant of eight years, actor Jordan Firstman, tells us the backstory.
“So it was built by Dion Neutra, who was Richard’s son,” says Firstman, 35, lighting a cigarette on a balcony overlooking a shady, leaf-dappled swimming pool. “Dion kind of made this as a ‘F— you, Dad.’ He’s like, ‘I’m going to be an artist and have an artist compound.’”
Enjoying the turns of his anecdote, Firstman leans in. “And then I was with an ex at the time, just walking down the street,” he says. “There was a little sign that’s like, ‘Are you a Neutra fan? There’s an apartment opening up.’ Because he didn’t know how to use email. So I just called this number.”
His tale has many elements that could be called Firstman-esque: generational tension, a stroke of luck, a gay relationship that ends before it begins. Even the fact that he has since redecorated these interiors several times over, from blinged-out to something more focused (though still shocking pink), fits where he is right now.
Firstman has shed more personae than do most Instagram comedians-turned-actors. He used his time during the COVID-19 pandemic to break through virally with a series of mock-confessional “Impressions” (his bit as Mother Nature killing off the human race as a “toxic situation” is a keeper). He’s made traditional short films, worked in the writers’ room for HBO’s “Search Party” and sang about Laura Dern at the Spirit Awards. More recently, there’s been a comedy album, a role on “I Love LA” and plenty of misconceptions about who he really is.
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But it was his vicious, self-excoriating turn in Sebastián Silva’s 2023 dark comedy “Rotting in the Sun” — playing an amplified version of an obnoxious influencer named Jordan Firstman — that triggered something inside him. “I really went there with this persona and now I can’t really take that back,” he remembers. “And that is part of me in a way too. But I think I was aching for my heart to be seen.”
“Club Kid” (in theaters Nov. 6), a movingly sincere and wise new film that Firstman scripted, directed and toplined, is the result of three years of self-reflection and discipline. If this is some new persona for him, the Serious Indie Auteur, he should drop the others, because it turns out he’s as good at it as anyone else at work. Watching “Club Kid,” you feel the arrival of someone major. Not every comedy debut gets invited to Cannes. Firstman’s was. (He stood with his mother at the ovation: “I was like, OK, Mom, let’s go. I’m a serious filmmaker now — go away,” he jokes.)
In its early stretch, “Club Kid” presents the surface you might expect: the thumping milieu of New York’s 2016 queer club scene. The camera spins on its own ketamine high as Peter (Firstman), party promoter extraordinaire and generous drug dealer, kicks off another evening. Surprisingly, Firstman then takes a decade-forward leap into now, when sad-eyed 9-year-old Arlo (Reggie Absolom) shows up at Peter’s apartment, an accident from a forgotten tryst with a woman who’s just died by suicide back home in London.
Where did Arlo come from, creatively? Firstman says he was desperate to recapture a kind of innocence.
“Basically, for the most part, I was a good kid,” he says. “I was a mensch. I was definitely raised to be a mensch and being a good person was always part of it.”
Firstman’s parents (“liberal, NPR-listening, Jewish,” he sums up) were both hardworking reporters at Long Island’s Newsday. They set a tone but also came to realize that their son wasn’t about to be controlled.
“I wasn’t doing hard drugs,” he recalls. “I wasn’t being crazy. So they basically knew I wasn’t in danger. And so they were like, ‘Just let him go.’ And they were going through their own divorce and not really paying attention to me anyway. So I felt pretty independent. I always felt like I just wanted to be where the action was.”
In Arlo and Peter, taken together, there’s a complex self-portrait of Firstman himself, both desperate for freedom and venturing into the city, but also old enough to know better. It’s a nuanced balancing act between impulsiveness and the darker side of people-pleasing that took him several drafts, a bad breakup and a couple of years of rewriting to achieve. But as these two characters come together — as you know they will, satisfyingly — there’s also growth, pain and a universality that might remind you of movies about belated responsibility like “Knocked Up.”
Firstman isn’t displeased with the comparison. It’s a film he loves.
“My dream is for people to be like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe how much I’m relating to this film that has nothing to do with my life,’” he says. “That’s always been the goal for me.”
Informally, without any film school or much college (“I felt like I was always being punished for being myself,” he says of a brief span at a Cincinnati musical theater program), Firstman nursed an appreciation for the kind of artists he wanted to be like: Stephen Sondheim, Keith Haring, Woody Allen, Amy Winehouse, Rufus Wainwright.
“I remember when I was 8 or 9, I went to visit my grandma in California and came back and would lie on the floor listening to Natalie Imbruglia’s ‘Torn’ and cry,” he says. “And I remember liking that feeling. So I knew I liked the feeling of being emotional.”
Firstman fell in with a new crowd after moving to L.A. at 20. He was introduced to the underrated humane work of director Paul Mazursky (“An Unmarried Woman,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills”). “It was a huge breakthrough for me,” he says, “because I think the archness of Woody Allen softened when I found Mazursky.”
For all of these influences to coalesce onscreen, though, and become “Club Kid,” it would require a director of Firstman’s tenacity, good fortune and, paradoxically, the stubbornness of a first-timer who wasn’t used to compromising. (He says he put all his fees back into the movie.) Shot over 26 days in October 2025 using real New York clubs and locations — not to mention actual 35mm film stock, instantly vaulting “Club Kid” to the company of burnished five-borough classics — the movie’s success would depend on its Arlo.
“I saw his face and I was just like: ‘That is who I saw my whole time writing this,’” Firstman says of Absolom. “I remember literally taking a break being like, ‘Please, God, let him be able to act.’ And then he just gave the most natural audition. It was like he was just talking. And then I met him and instantly in his eyes — it was just like we made eye contact and I knew him. We felt like friends immediately.”
One of “Club Kid’s” standout moments is a long, uninterrupted take of tentative bonding, Peter and Arlo both sharing the pain of maternal loss, a potential parental figure finally emerging. “That’s my favorite scene,” Firstman says. “When we shot that scene, everyone was like, ‘We have a movie now.’ Because it’s one take. I still am confounded by how present he is in that scene. There’s not one inauthentic moment ever.”
A beautifully sustained piece of writing (“The script is how we got everyone,” says Firstman), it has brought out some of the best work from a deep bench of talent, none of them playing out-and-out villains but real New Yorkers caught in a complex swirl of bad choices. Notable among them are Diego Calva (“Babylon”) as a sweetly sympathetic boyfriend and Cara Delevingne as a spiraling addict, the latter stealing the movie in one of the most wrenching stairwell scenes of recent years.
“I think I was tired of the millennial cynicism,” the director says. “Sophie, Cara’s character — you totally get where she’s coming from. She’s a mess, but she’s been edged out of this scene. She doesn’t know where to turn financially. Everyone hates her. It’s so sad.”
With the making of his movie behind him, Firstman is back in his adopted hometown, doing less clubbing and leading a more solitary existence than you might expect — and happily. “It’s a very weird and beautiful city and it’s isolating in a way that gives a lot back to me,” he says of L.A.
On the agenda for the social media king? A strategic workout, a party on a boat in Marina del Rey and the most glorious spicy shrimp in town.
He can’t really say what’s next and you believe he’s not playing coy but at an actual turning point. “The only thing that’s been consistent throughout all my shorts and TV things is that it always revolves around two lost or lonely men,” Firstman offers.
Why does he think that is?
“I think it’s because I am a lost and lonely man,” he bats back. “I feel like I’ve been the only consistent person in my life and I’m the only one who knows all the details about it. And I’m the only one who really knows how I got to the place that I’m at and what made me me. So yeah, people come and go and teach you things about yourself. And I think that’s what this movie is too. It’s about two people who find each other at the right time.”
Firstman might be finding himself at the right time too.
