It’s been a fairly muted Cannes Film Festival this year. The closest thing to a starry, major-studio event was a 25th anniversary screening of The Fast and the Furious attended by Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez. There’s less than a week left to go, and so far the most-anticipated movies in the competition slate, from James Gray’s Russian mob drama Paper Tiger (reuniting Marriage Story alumni Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson) to Paweł Pawlikowski’s Sandra Hüller-starring Fatherland and Asghar Farhadi’s French debut Parallel Tales, have not been met with the enthusiastic reception we’ve come to expect from the launchpad for the biggest arthouse films of the year. Worst of all, the standing ovations are sometimes clocking in at a measly three minutes, which is the Cannes equivalent of being pelted with tomatoes.
You have to venture outside of the heavy hitters for the true gems of the festival. The highlight? Jordan Firstman’s directorial debut Club Kid, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section on Friday and was just nabbed by A24 for an eye-watering $17 million. The fact that this is the movie Searchlight and Netflix fought over and critics talked excitedly about all weekend comes as a bit of a surprise. The internet-fluent comedian blew up during the pandemic with his impression of “banana bread’s publicist,” doubled down on his rambunctious persona by playing a ketamine-addicted, sexed-up version of himself in 2023’s Rotting in the Sun, and became a magnet for controversy (Heated Rivalry-gate most recently).
The film’s premiere would probably lead you to expect more of the same: Firstman, who played Rachel Sennott’s stylist bestie in I Love LA, joked that he was delighted to be in the “De-bussy” theatre and asked the audience, “Got a bump?” Sure, it’s the kind of intro that doesn’t necessarily scream “Cannes-approved auteur,” but as Club Kid reveals itself, it blossoms into something a lot more wholesome than it first lets on. Believe it or not, Firstman has made an honest-to-god crowd-pleaser, destined to be one of the great unexpected hits of the year.
One of the surprises of Club Kid is how classically conventional (complimentary) its foundations are. Firstman stars as Peter, a club promoter in perpetual arrested development. Refusing to address his issues, he stumbles into an important work meeting with his business partner Sophie (Cara Delevingne) still high from the night before, a problem she solves by giving him a bump. After unwittingly having sex a decade prior with a British woman he only remembers by the nickname “innit babes”, he finds on his doorstep the son he never knew he had. Arlo (Reggie Absolom) is an endearing, wise-beyond-his-years kid who’s easy to love, with a music taste that skews towards Björk and The Cocteau Twins and a childhood spent on the periphery of the same scene that Peter has made his home. And so Peter is forced to grow up, learn how to be a parent, and accept when the party is over.
From the opening scene, where Peter and his friend group of dolls pack themselves into an Uber on the way to the club, Firstman vividly renders the New York party scene with tender reverence. Characters trade online jokes and memes (Club Kid surely makes Cannes history as the first film to name-drop Charlie Kirk) that never read as cringe or inauthentic, a feat that most movies set today struggle to achieve. But beyond the comedy with an impressive laugh-per-minute rate, there’s genuine earnestness in a story about finding community and purpose.
Club Kid is undeniably a Jordan Firstman movie, translating his terminally online persona into something more palatable without sacrificing who he is, presenting his abrasive humor as an armor his character gradually sheds. Frankly, he’s also just made a damn good movie: centered on a sweet father-son relationship that has shades of the Joaquin Phoenix-starring C’mon C’mon, it’s funny, unapologetic, and disarmingly sincere. You could see it as a reinvention, or we’re just finally witnessing the real man behind the Instagram account.
This story originally appeared in British GQ.