‘Dìdi’ Review: A Taiwanese American Coming of Age in the Early Age of Social Media

With his 2008-set Dìdi, Sean Wang captures the intermingling of adolescent friendship and early social media through the lens of the Asian American diaspora, and with welcome specificity. The importance that a MySpace Top 8 and profile song carries in the world of Chris (Izaac Wang), a 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy, cannot be overstated, nor can the significance of AOL Instant Messenger in sustaining and expanding his friend circle, nor his YouTube channel in allowing him to express his sense of humor.

When it homes in on the disparities and contradictions between Chris’s online and real-life interactions, emotions, and behavior, Dìdi feels nothing short of truthful. Chris is a typically insecure teen, but to such an extreme that he’s almost preternaturally self-sabotaging. And Wang admirably doesn’t shy away from depicting Chris at his most awkward or abhorrent and the myriad ways his behavior alienates him from family and friends, old and new alike.

One through line, involving Chris’s crush on a classmate, Madi (Mahaela Park), is particularly canny for the way that it captures how a teen boy’s timidity can become weaponized, while another subplot about his burgeoning friendship with a trio of older skaters unearths layers of truth regarding the dangers of trying to impress older kids with a falsified portrait of who you are. A scene in which Chris embarrasses his best friend, Fahad (Raul Dial), in front of the latter’s date (Alysha Syed) and her friend (Alaysia Simmons) by telling a wildly inappropriate story about their activities involving a dead squirrel precisely conveys the excruciatingly painful consequences of two young male friends having vastly different skill levels in talking to girls.

But while many of these snapshots of the prickliness of early teenhood often ring true, Dìdi bites off more than it chews once it starts to also focus on Chris’s complicated and dysfunctional home life. As Chris’s mother, Chungsing, Joan Chen brings a quiet yet palpable energy to her scenes, fluently evoking the woman’s tenderness toward Chris and his older sister, Vivian (Shirley Chen), as well as her stifled regret that her life hasn’t exactly turned out the way she wanted. That, though, makes it all the more disappointing that the character, like Vivian and Chungsing’s mother, Nai Nai (Zhang Li Hua), is ultimately so thinly sketched.

Much of Dìdi’s narrative is drawn from Wang’s childhood experiences, and one gets the sense that, in order to remain as true to those experiences as possible, he spreads himself thin. Indeed, as much as individual moments here brim with the authenticity of vivid inner lives, the film is overstuffed, and to the point that the connective tissue between scenes sometimes missing. Certain storylines, like Chris’s experiences as a filmer for the older skater kids, end abruptly, never to be returned to, while Chris’s relationships with Vivian and Fahad suddenly turn sour or are fully rehabilitated with almost no context to explain the about face.

But despite such flaws, Dìdi remains a worthy entry in the pantheon of coming-of-age films. That’s because it speaks so unflinchingly to the unique anxieties and frustrations of early teenhood in this particular time and place, which is just as welcome as its willingness to elide the redemptive arc that one expects from the genre’s tried-and-true playbook.