Jordan Firstman (Sort Of) Grows Up With Debut Feature Film ‘Club Kid’

At the tail end of this year’s New York Film Festival, on an early October Saturday night, several A24 staffers were busy shuffling the gorgeous, multigenerational cast of the distributor’s recent Cannes acquisition down the red carpet set up inside Lincoln Center.

Nathan Fielder and Vera Wang chatted briefly as the crowd waiting to enter Alice Tully Hall grew, while Julia Fox and other beautiful downtown and Brooklyn nightlife fixtures fanned out around the auditorium. The night’s star, Jordan Firstman, was one of the last to arrive on the carpet, in the moments just before the hometown premiere of Club Kid, his quantum leap from Instagram comic impersonator-turned-TV writer to auteur filmmaker. With his tight brown curls and perma-grin, Firstman was an absolute natural with the press and the crowd, delivering genuine New Yorker bravado and razor-sharp replies — some perhaps locked and loaded — as he worked a line of news outlets and broadcasters eager for time with the it-boy of the moment and toast of the festival circuit.

Club Kid, Firstman’s debut feature, landed at A24 — perhaps the most fitting home for it — after a bidding war that followed a lengthy standing ovation at its Cannes premiere in the festival’s Un Certain Regard section. The perpetually-hip New York distributor appears to be grooming the film as an awards-season dark horse; it was recently submitted for Golden Globes consideration in the drama categories, rather than the less competitive musical or comedy race. The film plays perfectly in both but the decision speaks for itself.

“Forty-two percent,” the filmmaker joked with The Hollywood Reporter when asked how much of Firstman, the real-world human, is in Peter, the wayward lead he plays in his debut. The film is his entry into an admittedly well-trodden category: comedies about a childless urbanite or misfit who suddenly becomes a single parent. The genre has given us classics like Paper Moon, sentimental favorites like Disney’s The Kid; broad modern takes like the Diane Keaton vehicle Baby Boom, the inevitable Adam Sandler version, Big Daddy, and arthouse spins like Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon. With Club Kid, the genre now has an unflinchingly queer entry, one that doubles as a coming-of-age drama about an adrift man emerging from the haze of the NYC party scene and the arrested development that such a lifestyle can foster.

“I already liked the genre, and I felt like a queer addition to the canon was actually not superfluous. It was actually meaningful, and there was something to say there because of how queer men grow up,” Firstman told THR just before presenting the film to his home city. “Because we don’t get pressure to get married or have kids. We have this kind of prolonged adolescence. So, everything kind of just started clicking into place at that point.”

Coming from someone with Firstman’s signature deadpan delivery and nice-Jewish-boy-from-Long-Island charm, that 42 percent figure feels like a modest understatement of how much of his own life experience shapes Peter — a club fixture in his 20s who, in the film’s opening moments, has a drug-fueled encounter with a British woman he meets in a club’s darkroom, only to never speak to her again.
After a smash cut to 10 years later, Peter has graduated from club fixture and life of the party to adrift, half-tuned-out party promoter, and a 10-year-old son he never knew he had is dropped into his life after the boy’s mum dies suddenly.

Firstman ultimately betrays his lowball estimate by copping to the many ways in which Peter may be more him than that figure suggests.

“I think [Peter has] my loneliness and the way I navigate the world, and feeling like I’m this person that brings people together. And then I go home and I feel alone. I think that’s a very real thing for me, and I think Peter has that too,” Firstman explained. “He is like a caretaker, but he doesn’t take care of himself. And I think if you saw, like, my car, for instance, you’d say, ‘You need to, like, take care of yourself.'”

Firstman’s longing, that caretaker instinct, and his tangible sense of today’s nightlife scene in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn stem from the winding path that brought him to the cusp of fame. The son of two Newsday journalists, he grew up in the suburbs outside New York with two sisters, both of whom are lesbians (“Three for three!” he exclaims). His teen years, during which he emulated Kurt Cobain for a spell and got into musical theater, eventually gave way to a love of comedy. He pursued it in earnest after a brief stint in the University of Cincinnati’s undergraduate musical theater program, dropping out to move to L.A., where at 23 he landed a job writing for the cult hit Search Party.

His early TV writing and comedy career was punctuated by a move to Berlin, where he partied at Berghain and lived the German version of the Club Kid lifestyle, in which ketamine and cocaine fly onto the backs of toilet seats faster than the relentless, four-on-the-floor beats at the notorious club’s main dance floor. In Berlin, he fell in love and partnered, twice — having gone and retired for relationships that, as he explained to THR’s Scott Feinberg at a recent event at Chapman University, eventually left him brokenhearted. The fatigue of such heavy heartbreak is felt in Peter and runs as an undertone through Club Kid, a film rooted in both loss and redemption.

“I was at a phase in my life where I knew what I wanted to talk about was my own personal change, and I think I also wanted a way to change,” Firstman told THR. “And through art, I find, in writing, that’s the way I can figure out what I’m feeling the most. I was at this impasse and partying too much and doing too many drugs. And so I just started writing the story, and then the kid kind of just became the clearest representation of what is going to make this character grow up really fast.”

If you don’t yet know Firstman from his acting turns in shows including Ms. Marvel, The English Teacher and, currently, I Love LA, you’ve probably crossed paths with him online, whether you realize it or not. His first breakout came when his Instagram impressions series went viral, thanks to one Ariana Grande, who turned his goofy COVID lockdown fun into a sensation on the platform. He’s still trying to shed the followers the pop star sent his way back then, Firstman quipped at the Chapman event. His career has progressed steadily since with various short films entering prestige festivals and a writing gig for the Independent Spirit Awards that led to the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles delivering his brilliant musical ode to LGBTQ+ representation at the 2020 event. It all pushed him toward becoming a full-fledged filmmaker, and last year he boldly stepped into the director’s chair.

“I knew this guy had something to him that was interesting, and he had a voice, a perspective. He was willing to kind of take his artistry to places that he wanted, and was always willing to go,” Club Kid producer Alex Coco told THR at the NYFF premiere.

Coco was already familiar with Firstman’s work when the filmmaker’s team reached out with the Club Kid script — he’d seen his acting, particularly in Sebastián Silva’s 2023 dark meta-satire Rotting in the Sun, in which Firstman plays an exaggerated version of himself on holiday at a gay nudist beach in Mexico. While speaking of the man of the hour, Coco draws several connections between Firstman and his own longtime collaborator, writer-director Sean Baker; the two have made multiple films together, and in 2025, Baker’s modern take on the Cinderella story, Anora, swept the Oscars. Both writer-directors have a talent for taking a universal concept and dropping it into a specific setting that hinges on providing a lived-in experience, he said.

“Even though he’s a first-time feature filmmaker, he’s been exposed to the business and he’s worked on a lot of sets. So he’s not green, you know. But nonetheless, there were a lot of things that we needed,” Coco said.

For one, attaching the perfect director of photography for the project was going to be crucial, so to capture the film’s kinetic club scenes and the vibe of present-day lower Manhattan and north Brooklyn. They found him in Adam Newport-Berra, whose work on prestige TV series Euphoria, The Studio and The Bear was preceded by stunning music videos for Kanye West, Dirty Projectors and Kendrick Lamar. His work elevates every scene of Club Kid, and after the shoot he shared a telling observation about the first-time filmmaker with Firstman himself.

“You know, my DP, Adam Newport-Berra, is a genius,” Firstman said as the red carpet was about to wrap and his film’s first New York screening was set to begin. “He said to me at the wrap party, ‘I’m very impressed with your patience.’ And I have never thought of myself as a patient person — quite the opposite.”

As he continued, his young co-star, the perfectly cast Reggie Absolom, was ushered away from the carpet; Colleen Camp, the character actor and producer (and Yvette the maid in the 1985 classic Clue) who plays Peter’s downstairs neighbor, gazed around with her signature smirk at the pre-screening hullabaloo; and a scrum of photographers corralled the film’s ensemble of downtown hipsters, club kids and actors for a series of group shots that Firstman soon joined.

“But then I thought, the way I worked with Reggie, and child actors, and non-actors, party kids,” he said as the group gathered for what was perhaps their biggest moment as a cast, and certainly one of Firstman’s biggest nights as he enters the next phase of his career. “I think I did give them space to find it, and give them time to find it. So I think I learned that I may be more patient than I thought.”

Club Kid opens today in New York and Los Angeles and nationwide later this month.