In Review: ‘Club Kid,’ ‘Being Heumann’

Club Kid
Dir. Jordan Firstman
121 min.

Shot with nervy energy and set to a pulsating beat, the opening scenes of Club Kid depict Peter (Jordan Firstman), a New York party promoter known and liked by seemingly everyone he meets, as a man in his element. With his partner Sophie (Cara Delevingne), Peter puts on club-packing events where drugs flow freely—often because it’s Peter making them flow—and dark rooms provide semi-discreet venues for anonymous hook-ups. But Peter’s not just an organizer; he’s also an enthusiastic participant and, by all appearances a satisfied customer energized by chemicals and casual sex. The year is 2016 and things are going great.

Most of the film isn’t set in 2016, however. A decade later, it’s clear that all these late nights and flitting about have started to take their toll. Though the business has stayed afloat, Peter can now barely put it together for meetings in which all he’s asked to do is drop a few celebrity names for prospective clients. So it’s pretty much the worst possible time for Edison (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), a hard-partying Brit, to show up at his apartment with Arlo (Reggie Absolom), Peter’s son from an impromptu three-way he participated in on that night in 2016. (One held shortly after Peter boasted of never even touching a vagina, but the drugs he was on that night helped change that.) Further complicating matters: Edison’s not Arlo’s mother, who recently took her own life. She’s just there to reunite father and son and be on her way.

That premise suggests that Club Kid, which doubles as Firstman’s first feature as writer and director, will use a road map that’s been around at least since three men were forced to care for a baby back in the ’80s, one that ends with lessons learned and old, irresponsible ways discarded. Club Kid works its way to that same destination, but follows its own path to get there. Firstman skillfully navigates around clichés and sentiment until the last possible moment. It focuses instead on the genuine bond that develops between Peter and Arlo as Peter upends his life to care for the cool, kindhearted, fragile boy who’s been left in his care. The two have a shared love of music and it doesn’t take long for Peter to realize that not only is he pretty good at being a father, he loves it, and loves the kid. Where that kid fits into his life is another question. Arlo becomes a kind of mascot for Peter’s friends, an assortment of queer club denizens who take him under their collective wing without fully appreciating the weight fatherhood places on Peter and the changes it demands. Peter’s bank account was already dwindling after splitting with Sophie and the only profession he knows isn’t all that compatible with parenthood anyway.

Club Kid is at once intimate in scale, visually ambitious (DP Adam Newport-Berra takes full advantage of the warmth made possible by 35mm), and unapologetically gritty. Firstman doesn’t look away from either the pleasures or the consequences of the casual sex and drugs that are just part of the air those in his circle breathe. Arlo’s arrival forces Peter to undergo a full-scale reassessment of his life, one intensified by an unexpected flirtation with Oscar (Diego Calva), a social worker who’s a bit wary about crossing a professional boundary. (Calva’s a standout in a strong supporting cast that includes Colleen Camp as an eccentric neighbor and Eldar Isgandarov as a freeloading roommate who’s overstayed his welcome.) If there’s a bum note to the film, it’s that Arlo’s needs often feel secondary to Peter’s journey of self-discovery, but Firstman otherwise deftly balances comedy and drama while investing a familiar story with details from an after-hours world of pounding music, in jokes, niche drug slang, and nebulously defined relationships. Club Kid opens with a party but it’s ultimately more interested in what’s left, and what matters, when the party winds down. —Keith Phipps

Club Kid opens in limited release today before expanding.

Being Heumann
Dir. Sian Heder
127 min.

The thesis of the 2020 documentary Crip Camp, about a hippie-coded early ’70s Catskills summer camp for disabled teenagers, is that its freewheeling rambunctiousness seeded a civil rights movement. Among the future revolutionaries at the camp was Judy Heumann, a Brooklyn-raised firebrand who contracted polio at 18 months and needed a wheelchair, which limited her access to education as a child and her desire to educate as an adult. (Without ramps to get into schools, she was considered a “fire hazard.”) Heumann was more serious-minded than her peers at Camp Jened, who treated their own slice of upstate New York like a personal Woodstock, where free love and politics could intermingle—and, in its way, suggest a better, more equitable life than the country had allowed them. They were loath to go back to feeling invisible. 

The challenge for Being Heumann, a docudrama about a turning point in the disability rights movement, is to capture this same lightning in a bottle, since much of it takes place in a San Francisco federal building that activists converted into their own improvised Camp Jened. There are indeed sparks of merry chaos over the 26-day occupation of the building, like wheelchair races and a “sex tent” for discreet quickies, but director/co-writer Sian Heder’s woefully earnest tone drains the life out of it. Despite an ensemble cast of disabled actors with great collective verve, Being Heumann has the TV-movie flatness of comparable biopics like the Ruth Bader Ginsburg tribute On the Basis of Sex, which lack the audacity of the women at their center.

As a simple, effective reminder of the common obstacles that faced women like Heumann before disability access became law, Heder opens with her heroine (Ruth Madeley) trying to navigate traffic in a major city where high curbs turn each street crossing into an ordeal. Heumann and her comrades have been tilting at this particular windmill for the four years since Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits disability discrimination in federally funded programs, passed without ever getting enforced. With Jimmy Carter in office, the enforcement decision rests with Joseph Califano (Mark Ruffalo), Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), but Califano continues to balk at the price tag and timetable for making these buildings and spaces accessible. Disability activists dial up the pressure through simultaneous protests in cities across the country, but in San Francisco, Heumann rallies over 100 people to join a sit-in that draws nationwide attention. 

There are small brushfires here and there about strategy, mostly aimed at the limits of Heumann’s combative approach, but Heder draws the battle lines too plainly, with virtue on one side and bureaucratic cowardice on the other. Dylan O’Brien is a snooze as a local TV reporter who embeds with the activists and Ruffalo’s Califano has a cartoon bluster that’s completely one-note, despite a political quandary that puts him between a rock and a hard place. Though Heder’s previous film, CODA, is the rare Best Picture winner that seems like the answer to an arcane movie trivia question, there’s a level of dramatic stakes and regional texture that’s virtually nonexistent in Being Heumann. It inspires admiration when it might be admirably inspired. — Scott Tobias

Being Heumann opens in limited release today. It starts streaming for Apple TV subscribers on November 13th.