The movie, Wang’s first narrative feature after an early documentary, was an audience award winner at Sundance in January, and his adorable short film about his grandmothers, “Nai Nai & Wài Pó,” was nominated for a 2023 Academy Award. At 30, the kid’s got a future. “Dìdi,” by contrast, commemorates his past as an aching adolescent twerp with a skill that positions it as the middle-school male’s answer to Bo Burnham’s “Eighth Grade.”
The hero, Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) — Dìdi to his family (it means “little brother” in Mandarin) and Wang Wang to his friends — is in a turmoil of desire to be someone, anyone, cooler than himself, a brace-faced former nerd practicing his skateboard moves in an empty driveway. His sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), with whom he’s locked in eternal battle, is getting ready to leave for college, leaving Chris at home with his artist mother (a lovely, careworn performance from Joan Chen) and testy grandmother (spitfire Zhang Li Hua, reprising her real-life role as the filmmaker’s nana in “Nai Nai & Wài Pó”). Father is away on business in Taiwan and never seen, an absence that unmoors Chris even further in angry free fall.
There’s a girl — of course there’s a girl — and the surprise of the early scenes in “Dìdi” is that Chris’s crush, Madi (Mahaela Park), finds his tongue-tied shyness intriguing. A more rose-colored memoir might lead to an uncomplicated first kiss, but Wang is more interested in the ways a smart but utterly clueless man-child would torpedo any chance to show his emotional vulnerability.
So it goes, as Chris tries to find his way in an unfamiliar flip-phone/Myspace/AIM world, one he keeps at bay only with an ever-present video camera. It’s a universe triangulated by his socially glib middle-school best friend (Raul Dial), a trio of older skateboarders who ooze knee-scabbed street cred, and his overachieving Asian American classmates — the “good” kids Chris defines himself against to the uncomprehending horror of his family.
At a certain point, “Dìdi” lifts its head to bring us into the mother’s world and into the emotions coursing through this gentle woman — abandoned by her husband, criticized by her mother-in-law and ridiculed by her children — as her son contorts himself into a miserable pretzel of loneliness. Director Wang re-creates a very specific first- and second-generation American experience, watching to see where the two pieces chafe and where they fit, but while the film’s cultural and period details are precisely drawn, the landscape of feeling is eternal — and at times overly familiar. It’s a well-trod road traveled in “Dìdi,” and sometimes it’s hard to see the hero’s footprints for the many that have come before.
The teenage cast is mostly made up of nonprofessional actors; lead Izaac Wang has had prior film experience, but, whether from skill, intuition or direct experience, he conveys the stroppy insolence and uncertainty, the hopes and humiliations, of a real boy. His director has referred to Wang (no relation) as “the perfect balance of an actor and a punk,” and there’s more than a bit of Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel to the kid, down to the home-video freeze-frame that caps the film’s opening segment.
Sean Wang knows that freeze-frames end, though, and life goes on. “Dìdi” may recall stronger movies on the subject: the aforementioned “The 400 Blows” and “Eighth Grade,” Greta Gerwig’s “Ladybird,” and Jonah Hill’s “Mid90s,” among many others. But the advantage of Wang’s film is ultimately in particularity — the agonies and ecstasies of this kid in this culture, trying desperately to figure out who he wants to be while being cherished, in all his aggravating wonder, by the man he became.
R. At area theaters. Contains language throughout, sexual material, and drug and alcohol use, all involving teens. In English and Mandarin, with subtitles. 94 minutes.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
