Peter runs Club Labor out of sheer momentum and chemical enthusiasm. He's been doing it for over a decade: sourcing the drugs, marshaling the best-dressed crew, knowing everyone worth knowing. The comedowns are getting harder. His business partner Sophie — Cara Delevingne, sharper here than she's ever been on screen — watches him show up to an investor lunch straight off a rave and tells him flatly that he's a fucking child. She's not wrong. Then Leonora arrives at his door with a 10-year-old named Arlo, and the arithmetic of a darkroom threesome a decade ago suddenly requires accounting. Arlo's mother has died. Peter is responsible. What follows is the version of this story Firstman earns rather than the one the trailer advertises — which is, unfortunately, a morality tale about how a cute kid teaches a club rat what really matters. That film would be easy to ignore. The actual film is something else. Firstman cast from his real world. Nightlife personalities Alaska Riley and Miss Benny play queens of the scene without the self-consciousness that usually dogs casting decisions like this. Saturn Risin9 as Saffron, the DJ who teaches Arlo to use mixing decks, brings a quality the review rightly calls luminous — which we'd normally ban as press-release vocabulary, but in this case it's the honest word for what she does. Reggie Absolom as Arlo is brilliantly natural. Diego Calva, from Narcos, plays the social worker and confidant with a restraint that keeps the film grounded whenever it risks tipping into fable. What Firstman understands — and what most films about nightlife get catastrophically wrong — is that the culture is worth taking seriously on its own terms. He shoots on 35mm film stock, and the physical warmth of that choice is doing real argumentative work: this world deserves the same celluloid respect as anything else. The film doesn't pretend the lifestyle is consequence-free. It looks the problems directly in the eye. But it also captures the cab rides screaming along to Rihanna, the romance of surrendering to the beat, the bodies intertwining as the sun comes up. You can practically smell the hot garbage outside Peter's Lower East Side apartment, and the film loves the city anyway. The ending is slightly too neat — Firstman tidies things up where a rougher cut might have let the tension hang. And the trailer, which packages the whole enterprise as Oscar-bait redemption, is actively misleading in a way that will cost the film some of the audience it deserves. But these are small complaints against a debut that received a standing ovation at Lincoln Center and — according to the reviewer — left the man seated nearby doubled over after a joke about aspiring queer philosophers. Club Kid is a gem that could have come from no one else, and that specificity is the whole argument.
