The 'I Love LA' actor’s Cannes-bowing directorial debut trades the queer provocation of his past work for a cozy fable about unexpected parenthood.
The writer and actor Jordan Firstman — known for viral web videos, for films like Rotting in the Sun, for the television series I Love LA — is an acquired taste. He often plays into a certain abrasive, ditzy stereotype about gay men who live in big cities: sex-crazed but loveless, self-conscious and self-aggrandizing at once, literate but dumb, politically aware and yet eager to transgress supposed civility. As a nascent star, he’s been pretty divisive, both embraced for being a gadfly who actually puts in the work and scorned for what is viewed as brash over-confidence.
Firstman’s debut directorial effort, Club Kid, shrewdly acknowledges those garish personality tics, which have both endeared and repulsed audiences. Firstman plays Peter, a drug-happy party promoter tripping the light fantastic in New York. He and his gregarious friends, a queer melange of DJs and scenesters and enablers, have seized a corner of the city’s nightlife and turned it into something like a livelihood. In Peter’s case, his work provides a neat cover for what appears to be a pretty serious dependence on cocaine and other narcotics. But he’s not hurting anyone besides himself, so what’s the harm really?
