Prepare for a bitter pill—we are far enough into the future for late 2000s nostalgia. Not even the EARLY 2000s, the LATE 2000s! The almost 2010s! The beginning of the OBAMA ERA! Sean Wang’s terrific and existentially terrorizing coming-of-age drama, Dìdi, recreates a 2008 summer with the fanatic and loving detail of the best period pieces…because Dìdi is a period piece.
Inspired by his own childhood and late-2000s coming-of-age, writer/director Sean Wang takes us to Fremont, California and the home of a boy just entering teenagedom. At home, he is Dìdi, which is Mandarin for “little brother”. To his friends he is “Wang Wang”, and to the white kids he wants to impress, he is “Chris”. Dìdi is played by young actor Izaac Wang, and Wang is, like Elsie Fisher before him, a stunning find. He is maximally all of Dìdi’s worst traits and nuanced in his portrayal of Dìdi’s vulnerabilities and anxieties. Partly due to Sean Wang’s writing but a lot due to Izaac Wang’s superb performance, Dìdi feels like a real kid, not a movie kid.
At home, Dìdi has an older sister, Vivian (Shirley Chen); his mother, Chungsing (Joan Chen); and his grandmother, Nai Nai (played by Wang’s real-life grandmother, Chang Li Hua, who also starred in his Oscar-nominated documentary short, Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó). Missing is his father, who is still in Taiwan, working. The absence of his father means that Chungsing bears the brunt of Dìdi’s adolescent fury and fear, and their relationship is fraught with tension and love. On top of normal hormonal teenage stuff, Dìdi is also dealing with the added pressure of being a child of immigrants and carrying all their hopes and dreams.
Dìdi captures myriad experiences with soul-searing honesty and realism, from Chungsing and Nai Nai fretting over the kids’ fruit consumption and bowel movements, to the way Dìdi/Wang Wang/Chris code-switches among his various friend groups, to the ordeal of a first crush, to the transition of childhood away from outside to digital space. Dìdi’s summer is mostly spent outside, blowing up mailboxes and practicing skateboarding, but more and more of his time is occupied with his computer, messaging a girl he likes on AOL Instant Messenger—complete with historically accurate embarrassing screenname—trawling MySpace for clues about the girl he likes, or where he stands in his friend group (top 8 was a curse!), and hastily creating a Facebook account to connect with said girl.
She is Madi (Mahaela Park), a classmate who turned pretty, and while Dìdi has a crush, he’s also not quite mature enough to handle it. One of the central tensions in Dìdi is how hard Dìdi is trying to grow up, how he tries to make himself more mature than he is, only to chicken out when Madi tries to flirt with him (albeit awkwardly, she’s just figuring things out, too), or drifting apart from his best friend, Fahad (Raul Dial), who has gained confidence seemingly out of nowhere, and is rapidly becoming a charming kid. Dìdi knows he wants to be where Fahad is, socially and emotionally, and he wants to reciprocate Madi’s innocent flirtation, but he’s just not there, and from that gap springs much of his anger, most of which is directed at his mom and sister.
There are plenty of funny scenes in Dìdi—frantically googling “how to film skate video” after telling cool skater kids you can film skate videos is up there—but there is also a lot of melancholy and negativity. Dìdi is so angry—at his absent dad, at his mom, at his grown-ish sister, at his own perceived failings. There is a sense that if Dìdi can’t get a handle on that anger, he might end up doing irreparable damage to his own psyche, never mind his family and social life. As it is, he’s going to have plenty of embarrassing stories to tell on himself as an adult. Dìdi doesn’t quite match the remove-my-own-skin-to-escape-the-discomfort level of secondhand embarrassment as Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, but there are still plenty of moments to make anyone and everyone cringe. It is truly a smorgasbord of fontrum, Dìdi is frequently appalling to those closest to him, and Sean Wang is relentless in portraying this moment in adolescence in all of its emotional horror.
But for all that, Dìdi is a wonderful film, stark about growing up, yes, but also kind about mistakes and the way teenagers complicate family dynamics. There is a huge well of sympathy for Chungsing in the film, and Joan Chen’s performance is outstanding as a woman overwhelmed by her situation, alone in a new country and baffled by the gremlin that moved into her son’s room. For all the flip-phones, MySpace, and retro slang (particularly the cringe-inducing days of “gay” being used as a casual slur), Dìdi is, like all the best coming-of-age tales, rooted in the experience of growing up, growing apart, and the painful realities of adolescence shared across generations and cultures. One thing that unites us all is the universal truth that being thirteen sucks.
Dìdi is now playing exclusively in theaters.
