Dìdi

Coming-of-age stories tend to focus on big life-changing moments that influence the hero’s life, but the truth can be a little less romantic: Sometimes growing up involves a series of awkward social fuck-ups. Didi is about a 13-year-old who excels in that department, going on an odyssey of failure in his efforts to navigate friendships, romance and his own self-destructive impulses. Impressively, the movie digs into enough warmth and humanity that it pulls the audience through moments of severe cringe with laughs and empathy.

In his debut feature, writer/director Sean Wang tells a story inspired by his time growing up as a Taiwanese American in Fremont, California, in the East Bay. As for how autobiographical it is, Wang emphasised that he uses real life to inspire fiction rather than copy it when the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to enthusiastic audiences. (It won the US Dramatic Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize for ensemble cast.) That said, his producers heavily implied during the Q&A that there was some truth to the character peeing in his sister’s moisturising lotion.

Regardless of the blurred lines between truth and fiction, Wang (who made the 2023 Oscar-nominated animated documentary short Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó), proves that you can find compassion for a character even as he’s behaving like a dumbass 13-year-old. Chris (Isaac Wang) is known as Did to his mom and Wang Wang to almost everyone else. Stuck in a chaotic house with his adversarial older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), he’s too busy worrying about his own problems to notice his mum (Joan Chen) is struggling with his father’s constant work travel and her mother-in-law’s constant criticism.

During the daunting summer before high school, he worries his friends Farad (Raul Diad) and Soup (Aaron Chang) are drifting away from him, screws up his chances with his crush Madi (Mahaela Park), and copes with it all by trying to make new skater friends under the guise of being an ace filmer of skate videos. It all seems destined to go wrong, but the degree to which it does is uncomfortably glorious.

Set in 2008, part of the movie’s charms are its details as a period piece. It takes place on the cusp of the smartphone revolution, when most people didn’t have them yet, and if you wanted to shoot video, you used a camcorder. YouTube existed in a notably different form, and Instant Messenger on a desktop computer was the way to chat with your friends. The trajectory was there, but we weren’t quite in the modern area of texting and social media.

This context of living during a transitional period in social interaction amplifies the sense of social awkwardness in our hero’s life. Chris doesn’t know how he’s supposed to act in these social situations, but then again, no one else had lived through an era when you can look up your crush’s favorite music and try to pretend that it’s also yours. If he doesn’t handle it with as much grace as we might hope for, well, it’s hard to blame him.