Gorgeous, heartrending Club Kid is hitting Canadian theatres. Read our TIFF review

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Club Kid is without doubt a major work. It is without doubt one of the best films at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. And while there is some doubt here, Club Kid just might make you cry.

Club Kid follows Peter, played by writer/director/star Jordan Firstman, as he drifts through the drugged-out "Club Kid" haze of an unactualized life. A young man with all of the fluid freedom of bachelorhood, but none of the grounding, concrete value of bounded responsibility.

A totally untethered, totally unhappy thirty-something living in the impressively sized, rent-controlled New York loft of his dead mother. A shiftless manbaby arriving still high to meetings for his party-promoter business, then looking for a reason to even care he's been fired.

Club Kid also follows Arlo (Reggie Absolom). That little broccoli-haired waif shows up on his doorstep 10 years after Peter (who is gay) had a half-conscious, fully regretful orgy with a British woman at one of his parties. The wide-eyed, infinitely vulnerable preteen is ferried there after his mother's sudden death — dropped off by a friend of Arlo's mom, who claims there are no other relatives who could possibly take him in.

She then promptly disappears — despite Peter's loud, confused protestations.

Protests like: He didn't know he had a kid. He's not ready to take care of a kid. Is the kid even in the country legally? And most importantly: isn't it unfair, and terrifying, to have your future colonized and destroyed by the all-consuming, all-hours dependency of a snot-nosed little infant?

OK, that last one might have been subconscious. But they are obviously coded into the fabric of Firstman's feature debut: a drippingly emotional but gobsmackingly genuine mark of a true talent's arrival. A deeply affecting melodrama that feels endearing and comfortingly predictable until it suddenly isn't, Club Kid is without doubt a major work.

It is without doubt one of the best films at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. And while there is some doubt here, Club Kid just might make you cry.

But it's not like you've never seen this movie before. Build out the setup, and you've got a narrative cycle you're probably so…

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