Dìdi

Coming-of-age tales will always give us some of the most personal, authentic, and heartfelt storytelling that we find in cinema. To make one, a filmmaker has to be established or promising enough for a studio to finance and distribute something almost certain to have an unknown actor in the lead role. The time between the period in question and becoming a fully formed filmmaker almost always gives meaningful perspective and growing up is the one thing that almost all of us get to do.

Sean Wang makes his feature debut as writer, director, and producer of Dìdi, a fine addition to the tradition. Wang is not a complete novice. His 17-minute short Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó competed for the Best Documentary Short Film at this year’s Academy Awards and would have been a worthy winner. For his first narrative feature, Wang reflects on his past, which won’t seem all that long ago to older moviegoers, but was more than half a lifetime ago for Wang, who turns 30 this year.

It’s the summer of 2008 and our filmmaker’s stand-in, 14-year-old Chris “Dìdi” Wang (Izaac Wang) is transitioning from eighth grade to high school. He has a small group of friends he hangs with, but their bond is more tenuous than that of Ferris and Cameron or Seth and Evan. For Chris, life unfolds at his computer, where AOL Instant Messenger is the dominant medium of communication and self-expression occurs at MySpace and Facebook.

Computers have always been heralded as a tool for learning and Chris does plenty of that to research Madi (Mahaela Park), the girl that has caught his eye. He turns her MySpace anthem into his ringtone and when they get to chatting, he cites A Walk to Remember as a movie recommendation, pulling directly from her Facebook favorites. The 14-year-old Wang seems to fancy himself clever and cunning, although the 30-year-old Wang seems less impressed by his younger self.

Online research into kissing techniques fails to prepare Chris for a playground hang with Madi, which is painfully and believably uncomfortable. That brings an abrupt end to the boy’s burgeoning romantic obsession. He blocks her on AIM and moves on to trying to make new friends, volunteering to use his digital video camera to be a “filmer” for some older skater bois.

You might think — since sixteen years later, Wang is making a movie for the masses — that skate videos were his ticket to the arts, but that too proves to be a humbling experience.

Real-life Wang does not seem compelled in the slightest to embellish his adolescent exploits. The Taiwanese-American filmmaker owns up to his awkward past to a sobering degree. His tale is not meant to inspire in a traditional way, but rather to console teenagers of the past who have gone through these challenging trials as well as present-day teens going through them now. The social networks may be different and the phones may be smarter now, but the things that Chris agonizes over — friends, family, love, a career path — are things that have tormented teenagers forever and will continue to do so indefinitely.

The setting of sunny California in 2008 distinguishes Dìdi from other fine coming-of-age films it might remind you of, which for me included the semi-recent A24 triumphs Lady Bird and Eighth Grade and Jonah Hill’s mid90s. Others may appreciate that Wang’s childhood is presented from a distinctly Asian-American perspective. A decent amount of the movie unfolds in Mandarin and even Chris’ titular nickname gets treated to Chinese symbols. (It means “younger brother.”)

The four focal Wangs make for an interesting study. The father is inexplicably out of the picture, preoccupied with some unspecified work. Older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) is headed off to college, but not before continuing to butt heads with her brother via dinner table obscenities and one truly heinous prank. The kids’ grandmother Nai Nai (Chang Li Hua) seems very inspired by the nonagenarian grandmother of the same name who featured in Wang’s Oscar-nominated familial short. And then there is Chris and Vivian’s mother (Joan Chen of “Twin Peaks” and The Last Emperor), a painter with tremendous gifts and nothing to show for them. She wants the best for her kids and, for Dìdi, that includes the occasional McDonald’s dinner and a PSAT prep class held in somebody’s garage. A recurring motif of coming-of-age films is their makers realizing just how much their parents did for them, even though they seemed to drive them crazy at the time. That is one of many relatable aspects here.

Dìdi premiered at Sundance last January, where it won the Audience Award for U.S. Dramatic film and a special jury prize for its ensemble cast. Its slow, gradual rollout now while summer winds down and many prepare to begin the next phase of their life, be it high school, college, grad school, or adulthood, is fitting and a welcome antidote to big summer shenanigans from the tentpoles whose booming soundtracks may well carry over to theaters showing this. Alternately funny and heartbreaking, nostalgia-inducing for the tail end of Millennials, and generally life-affirming for all of us, Dìdi is a sharp and satisfying debut. Let us hope that Wang can build upon the powerful, personal moments within and not just settle for the first big studio payday that inevitably will come his way.