Club Kid

A man who can turn every night into day fails, of all things, at the next morning. That is the premise of the year’s most surprising festival hit. Peter organises New York’s wildest parties. He knows every DJ, every drug, every back door of every club in the city. For years the dancefloor has been his home, his friends his family. Then Arlo is standing in front of him: ten years old, his mother dead, Peter his father. And now Peter, of all people, the eternal club kid, is supposed to take responsibility, he who has always escaped every seriousness of life into the next party.

“Club Kid” at first sounds like an Adam Sandler comedy in which an irresponsible hell-raiser is brought to his senses by a child. But Jordan Firstman, once an Instagram provocateur and star of Sebastián Silva’s sex comedy “Rotting in the Sun”, refuses this convenient redemption. His feature debut, shot on 35mm, celebrates queer nightlife not as a youthful wrong turn but as a place where people keep reinventing themselves and catching one another. Somewhere between ketamine, hangover and childlike curiosity, the result is a gloriously irreverent comedy in which fatherhood does not mean the end of freedom. A film full of dirty jokes and unexpected tenderness, which became the true festival sensation in Cannes.