Written and Directed by Sean Wang | 93 min | ▲▲▲▲△
Didi (“Younger Brother” in Mandarin) is about a Taiwanese American kid in Fremont, in the Bay area around San Francisco. It’s set in 2008, and I think might be the first genuine Millennial nostalgia movie. It incorporates all the growing-up-online tropes that would’ve been a big part of most kids’ lives back in the oughties, as well as a lot of the casual racism you’d expect an Asian-American kid would face while exploring the immigrant experience in America. But this isn’t a message movie as much as a minor coming-of-age classic.
Chris Wang (Izaac Wang, apparently no relation to the filmmaker) — or Wang Wang to his friends — is into skateboarding and making videos to post on YouTube and online chat. He’s also frequently railing against his older sister, Vivian (Shirley Chen), and frustrated with his mother, Chungsing (Joan Chen, fantastic in the part), who dotes over him. But Chris has a lovely relationship with his paternal grandmother, Nai Nai (Zhang Li Hua), who does nothing but browbeat his mother for all the “mistakes” she makes raising her kids. Dad is out of the picture, living in Taiwan.
Chris hangs out with his buddies Fahad (Raul Dial) and Soup (Aaron Chang) and is obsessed with a girl in his class, Madi (Mahaela Park). Turns out Fahad might be a lot better at talking to girls than he is — but Chris has ambitions, like making skateboarding videos with a few guys he meets who hope to go professional.
All this is pretty funny — but tonally it quickly tilts toward melancholy and even grief as relationships in Chris’ life explode. He does things easily explainable, even fixable, just not to his teen brain. To him it’s all catastrophic.
Didi is intensely clear-eyed about the humiliations of the age, while also holding a lot of compassion for all its characters. It’s probably the most painfully funny vision of teen life since Grade Eight, and the most moving portrait of a mother-teen son relationship I’ve seen since Almost Famous. Funnily, Wang’s voice sounds remarkably like Patrick Fugit’s did in that movie.
One thing to admit — I’m probably too ancient to fully understand the nostalgia for 2008, especially any affection for the social networks of the era, which the filmmakers spend a little too much time on. Also, we get a drug trip sequence that feels like it’s wandered in from some other picture. But I suspect if you came of age in the first decade of the millennium, all this is likely to resonate hard.
