Growing up is a complicated mess. That has always seemed to be the primary message behind most — if not all — coming-of-age films about teenagers, regardless of the decade they’re set in. Writer-director Sean Wang (who earned an Oscar nomination earlier in the year for his short Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó) attempts to make his mark on the genre with his first feature, Dìdi. Set in sunny Fremont, California, in 2008, Dìdi charts that fuzzy transitional period between middle and high school, à la Bo Burnham’s seminal Eighth Grade. And like in that film, Dìdi tackles technology and social media and how they directly impact these young lives. However, Wang (a second-generation Taiwanese-American) also filters his story through a personal and often unsugared lens. It’s a funny and nostalgic crowd-pleaser — it won the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance — but it also achieves a certain solemnity, registering as a more contemplative film than one might expect from the coming-of-age format.
It’s the last month of summer vacation for 13-year-old Chris (Izaac Wang). His best friends Fahad (Raul Dial) and Jimmy — a.k.a. “Soup” (Aaron Chang) — call him “Wang Wang.” To his mother, Chungsing (Joan Chen), he is “Dìdi,” an affectionate Mandarin nickname translated as “little brother.” With her husband in Taiwan, Chungsing has to hold down the fort and care for her family, which includes Chris’ grandmother (Chang Li Hua) and older sister Vivan (Shirley Chen), who is about to head off to UCSD. The two siblings fight and bicker a lot, though they have one obvious thing in common — they both think their mother is embarrassing, in the way teenagers often do. Meanwhile, Chris has a crush on Madi (Mahaela Park), and his strategy to get close to her includes saying he likes Paramore and Nicholas Sparks films. He also begins to hang out less with Fahad and “Soup” and gravitates more toward some older skater boys, offering to film them doing tricks. And so it’s established early that this will be a pivotal summer for Chris as he learns how to skate, kiss girls, and love his family — and all on his own.
Dìdi toes a line between the distinct and the universal. The film is sketched with details that are uber-specific to 2008: Myspace pages, Paramore’s Riot!, AOL Instant Messenger, flip phones, and Superbad — the late-2000s nostalgia is palpable. Other aspects are quite familiar and synonymous with the coming-of-age genre: awkward first crushes, braces, complex and sudden changes to previously vital friendships, trying alcohol and weed for the first time. Both veins tie into Wang’s presentation of the crushing — or, perhaps more sitting since Paramore features so heavily in the film, the crushcrushcrushing — weight of growing up. Chris is an unruly kid; the first time we encounter him is as he films himself blowing up a stranger’s mailbox and posting the video on YouTube. He is stubborn and ungrateful toward his mother, talking back to her often. Yet, we also see the insecurity, a socially awkward and arguably desperate teen, habitually acting like someone he isn’t in order to impress others. This leads to him soon ditching the old childish YouTube videos he made — and his “Wang Wang” nickname — so that he might better fit in with Donovan (Chiron Denk) and co., but as he will find out, you’re not older just because you hang out with older kids.
Dìdi’s scenes of skateboarding youth immediately bring to mind films like Mid90s and Minding the Gap, but at the same time, Wang is clearly melding these reference points with the more personal, drawing on his own experiences to survey themes of Asian identity, cultural differences in these Fremont suburbs — Chris partly hides his heritage so he doesn’t have to be called “Asian Chris” — and tiger mom-encouraged academic pressures. Wang even shoots in his childhood home, and features his grandmother Chang Li Hua (also one of the stars of Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó) in a role. Add to that Chris’ burgeoning interest in filmmaking, and it’s hard to shake the impression of the semi-autobiographical (Wang would have been 13-14 in 2008). This intimacy moves Dìdi more toward something like James Gray’s Armageddon Time, which likewise documented a chapter from its director’s youth and proved willing to expose the more brattish, malicious sides of its main character rather than delivering only a stylized coming-of-age type.
In fact, there’s the lingering question here of whether Chris goes too far at times. His pranks on Vivian certainly go over the edge, and his words to her and Chungsing can be needlessly cruel. Even the skater friends he’s so determined to impress think he’s too harsh to his mom. Does this make Chris an unlikeable character? No. He’s simply a recognizable teenager, dumb and careless but not unfeeling. It’s a genuinely fleshed-out, three-dimensional characterization, one that may have benefited in some regards from pushing this even further, but what weaknesses do arise are mitigated by Wang, his performance so natural that it’s hard not to feel deeply for Chris, foibles and all. He can be stinging and unsympathetic in one moment, only to then reveal a wealth of palpable pain. Chen delivers a similarly rich performance, her Chungsing a woman of past ambitions and dreams, and the question of what might have happened if she hadn’t met his and Vivian’s father. Would she have made it to America and become an artist as she wanted? How different would life have been? But when Chris asks her if she is ashamed of him, this selfless woman tells him simply: “You are my dream.”
This scene is indicative of Dìdi’s genuinely moving nature, a quality that helps Wang’s film stand out within a crowded genre. Its deep feeling is buoyed by a great sense of time and place, detailing youth through the desktop computer screen and the weird glory years of the Internet before it collapsed in on itself. The teenage dialogue is likewise so realistic that it feels almost as if it could be an alien language, and Wang’s careful direction is inventive without ever distracting with overstylization. And it’s precisely this care — for craft, for character, for detail — that proves to be the film’s greatest achievement, capturing Chris’ complicated navigations of passions, friendships, and family with intimate clarity, and making his recognition of home’s warm embrace all the more moving.
DIRECTOR: Sean Wang; CAST: Izaac Wang, Joan Chen, Shirley Chen, Chang Li Hua; DISTRIBUTOR: Focus Features; IN THEATERS: June 26; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min.
Originally published as part of NYAFF 2024.
