‘Didi’ Review: Sean Wang’s Winning and Well-Acted Asian American Coming-of-Age Drama

Early in Dìdi, Chungsing (Joan Chen) tries to get her son, Chris (Izaac Wang), to look at a painting she’s made of their family. Chris, however, is extremely reluctant to turn away from the goofy YouTube video he’s been watching. When he finally does, he’s unmoved by her piece and instead picks a fight about what he describes as her nagging, and what she protests is just “caring.” It’s their relationship in a nutshell, and probably the relationships of lots of adolescent kids and their parents in a nutshell.

But if Chris seems unable or unwilling to see his mother for who she is in the moment, Dìdi, as a semi-autobiographical work by writer-director Sean Wang, feels like an apology come years later. The film is a very solid entry in the annals of coming-of-age films, reminiscent of Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade in both its affection for its young characters and its willingness to meet them on their own terms. But its real secret weapon turns out to be the equal empathy it extends toward Chungsing, whose own journey emerges as a moving complement to her son’s.

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Titled after the Mandarin term for “little brother,” Dìdi catches Chris at the tail end of the summer of 2008, a time of Livestrong bracelets, click-wheel iPods and Paramore’s Riot! t-shirts. For Chris, it’s also a time of significant personal change. Not only is his big sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) about to head off to UC San Diego — which, to a 13-year-old in Fremont, California, might as well be the ends of the earth — Chris is about to start high school, and is trying to figure out who he might be when he gets there. Over 91 minutes, Chris tries on and discards one identity after another: He shoots his shot with a slightly older crush (Mahaela Park) by pretending to like the same bands and movies she does, falls in with a crowd of skateboarders by volunteering his dubious services as a cameraman, tries to be the life of the party by “Wu-Tanging” a roach and gets a swift lesson in the perils of overindulging in weed.

Wang has made no secret that Dìdi draws heavily from his own youth, to the point that scenes in Chris’ room were shot in Wang’s childhood home and Chris’ grandmother is played by Wang’s (Chang Li Hua). But it’s a credit to the movie’s authenticity that those privy to none of those fun facts still might be able to guess that it’s rooted in real life: I don’t know if Wang’s big sister ever actually threatened to “period in [his] mouth” after he peed in her lotion, but the detail feels almost too hilariously, disgustingly specific to be made up. His characters look and act like real teenagers, with braces and acne and bratty streaks a mile wide. As painfully self-conscious as Chris can be, actor Izaac Wang’s performance of that insecurity is an impressively confident one. One gets the sense that even if Chris couldn’t articulate why he steals a trinket or calls a girl a “dumb bitch,” Izaac Wang could.

As with any Millennial or Gen Zer, Chris’ every new experiment in self-presentation is complemented by a flurry of online research, and Wang frequently borrows from the visual language of screen life films like Searching to capture the way Chris projects his anxieties through his inquiries. His desktop takes up the whole frame as he scans a MySpace Top 8 for hints about the status of a fraying friendship, or frantically looks up YouTube tutorials on how to have his first kiss. (He also practices his technique on a slice of apple, in one of many Dìdi scenes that might provoke snorts of recognition if not outright laughs.) More than once, he types out messages he can’t bring himself to send. In a particularly low moment, he tries confiding in a chatbot. “everyoen hates me and I have no freinds left,” he writes, to which the program responds, cheerfully but unhelpfully, “I’m your friend :).”

Against the intense ups and downs of Chris’s journey, Chungsing might fade into the background if not for Wang’s insistence on checking in with her perspective. Chris himself tends to treat her with a typically teenage disregard, ignoring her well-meaning overtures when he’s not grousing that her habit of eating McDonald’s with a knife and fork is “so Asian.” But Wang understands her even if his fictionalized counterpart can’t yet. He paints her as a born artist who’s never quite let go of her creative ambitions, whose unconditional love for her children cannot entirely dispel her disappointment at how ordinary her life has turned out to be. The role occasionally allows Chen to rant or rage, but most often trusts her remarkable ability to convey a lifetime’s worth of regret or joy or swallowed anger through a simple gaze.

At times, that gaze serves as an admonishment to Chris’ self-absorption: She fixes her eyes on him as he stubbornly retreats into himself and refuses to look up. But her restlessness plays most powerfully as a continuation of her son’s. While Dìdi treats Chris’ feelings without sugarcoating or condescension, taking seriously his sense that he’s totally lost amid life-or-death stakes, it’s also blessed with the perspective of grown-up wisdom. When Chungsing submits her work to a local contest or speaks wistfully of the career she might have led had she never settled down and had kids, she stands as a reminder that the search for identity that Chris is just now embarking on is one that never really ends, that there’s never a point when one’s self-understanding becomes fixed and one-dimensional. And Dìdi becomes our reassurance that someday, Chris will figure that out for himself, too.