Peter knows how to make a room feel like the place a person ought to have found earlier in the night. He has less experience being the person a child needs to find the next morning. In Club Kid, the arrival of his ten-year-old son Arlo makes those two skills seem briefly incompatible. Jordan Firstman, who wrote, directed and plays Peter, has a better idea than to spend the whole film asking him to pick one. Much of the warmth comes from letting a club promoter discover that some of the things he learned by making a night work might be of use to a child.
The prologue puts us close to the activity that Peter knows how to manage. Somebody needs to get into the room, somebody is looking for a better time inside it and everybody has a slightly different understanding of who can make a decision. Firstman has a feeling for the pace at which information can move through a club without reaching the person who ought to hear it. His interest in the room makes the movie’s eventual encounter with quieter responsibilities more specific. A film that treated the place as a generic sign of immaturity would lose the pleasure of watching someone who has actually learned to do a job.
The movie’s sense of the city is important to that contrast. A night can be arranged around several people who know different doors and different ways of getting through them. A morning with a child can require a much narrower set of decisions and a more dependable person to make them. Firstman finds comedy in the collision of those timetables. It gives him a concrete way to show why some of Peter’s abilities travel so well from the club to the child and why other parts of his life have to be renegotiated with the people who already depend on him.
Reggie Absolom gives Arlo a useful economy. A child encountering a parent for the first time has a great deal of information to collect and little reason to announce the conclusions he is drawing from it. Absolom can leave a pause open long enough for Peter to fill it with an explanation the boy never requested. It is one of the film’s sharper comic arrangements. The boy can also take an interest in an aspect of Peter’s life the man had been preparing to defend. Those reversals give the pair room to enjoy each other before the story asks an audience to believe in their attachment.
Firstman’s surrounding cast is important to that enjoyment. Friends and people who work the parties have practical claims on Peter and divergent ideas of what he can do. Cara Delevingne and the performers drawn from the scene give the world enough internal difference to resist becoming an all-purpose emblem of chosen family. There is real affection in letting somebody be good company and have a poor suggestion about how to handle a child. It allows the relationships to remain visible when a plot with a familiar outline starts distributing evidence that its hero is improving.
The casting of figures from New York nightlife gives the parties a range of claims on the camera. A person can be worth looking at for the amount of effort that went into getting there, and somebody across the room may have an entirely different reason to take an interest. The film benefits from the sense that a performer can have an evening going on beyond the point where Peter needs help. The convention of the disorganized parent eventually finding his feet has a limited supply of surprises. The lives adjacent to his give it more than one place to look for them.
Some of the later turns are easier to anticipate than the first scenes between Peter and Arlo. The movie has an understandable desire to show that the boy has changed the way Peter uses his time. Its finer achievement is in showing that people are already watching and helping each other in places outsiders may assume are chiefly about escape. Firstman’s performance gets funnier as Peter has to decide when to draw on that knowledge and when to admit that another person is entitled to want something from him he has never had to supply.
