Loosely based on his own life, Sean Wang’s beautiful coming-of-age drama follows a boy trying on different identities, desperate to find one that fits.
Chris (Izaac Wang) is a 13-year-old Taiwanese-American boy living in California. At home, his mum (Joan Chen) and grandma (Chang Li Hua) speak Taiwanese, while Chris and his older sister, Vivian (Shirley Chen), only speak – or rather stroppily shout – English. He even pretends to be only half-Taiwanese, so keen is he not to seem different. Among his friends, he feels like the tag-along, the kid who hasn’t worked out any of the stuff everyone else seems to find easy.
Chris is growing up at a tricky time. It’s 2008 and social media is in its infancy. People can see how many friends you have – or don’t. There’s a burgeoning expectation that you cultivate not just a real life persona, but a flawless, hilarious, apparently effortless online one. Chris doesn’t even know how to walk into a party comfortably. When he encounters a girl he likes, real life and online interactions give him double the opportunity to humiliate himself.
Director Sean Wang gets all the details hilariously, palm-sweatingly right
There are strong shades of Bo Burnham’s 2018 movie Eighth Grade here. That’s not to call Dídi derivative at all, but to say that it nails that high-school yearning to be cool and complete lack of any idea how to get there, making things worse for yourself with every attempt. It’s all intricately observed, from the way Chris code-shifts around different groups, to the way those he idolises gradually reveal their own insecurities and failings.
There’s a real generosity to Wang’s filmmaking. This is chiefly Chris’s story, but there are lots of little journeys clustering around him. His mother is trying to run a family essentially single-handed and hold onto her dream of being a painter. Vivian is transitioning to college life away from the family. Chris’s friend Fahad (Raul Dial) is learning that being the coolest of your gang isn’t necessarily a permanent state. Wang treats them all with gentle understanding and sympathy.
His cast are superb, especially Izaac Wang, authentically stroppy and bruised, and Chen as his mother, who feels just as rudderless as her son. If you grew up around the same time as Wang, you may feel extra emotional pangs, remembering the gut-punch of falling off someone’s MySpace ‘top friends’ or painstakingly crafting your Facebook status with more effort than you give your final exams. Wang gets all the details hilariously, palm-sweatingly right.
If this film is the story of his years of nervousness and self-doubt, his excellent debut suggests they’re long gone.
In US theaters Jul 26 and UK cinemas Aug 2.