Dìdi brutally frames how growing up is just one nightmare after another

Meet Chris Wang (Izaac Wang). Living in Fremont, California with sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), mother Chungsing (Joan Chen), and grandmother Nai Nai (Chang Li Hua), he's going through all the growing pains 13-year-olds endure. Social anxiety plagues this youngster, his crushes seem elusive, and he's got a fraught relationship with everyone in his household. Writer/director Sean Wang's Didi follows Chris in August 2008. That isn’t just the month M.I.A.’s "Paper Planes" topped the Billboard Hot 100 charts. It’s also a time of extreme change for Chris. High school is just on the horizon and his sister is moving out of the house to go to college. In the middle of all this turmoil, Chris is about to get a messy crash course in life, especially once he starts attaching himself to new friends in the form of much older skateboarders.

One of Dìdi’s strongest decisions is using actors who are actually 13-15-years-old. It’s a quality that adds an extra layer of humor and poignancy to scenes of Chris and his friends, like Fahad (Raul Dial), exchanging profane dialogue. These teens talk like they believe “real” adults talk. Yet their voices are still riddled with voice cracks and high-pitched reminders of their adolescence. They're kids playing dress-up as “provocative” adults, just regurgitating lewd terms they’ve read on the internet. Using real teenagers in Dìdi’s cast really hammers that idea home.

A similar layer of thoughtfulness permeates Wang’s approach to existing as a 13-year-old in 2008. Earlier this summer, John Krasinski’s IF featured that actor/director as a father telling his 12-year-old daughter that “growing up” will “make a great story someday”. That movie's reverence towards childhood and teenage life is something Dìdi has absolutely no time for. This is not a feature about wistfully yearning for “the good o’l days”. Instead, Wang’s writing echoes Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts and other great modern teenager films like Eighth Grade in capturing how brutal growing up is. This process isn’t a “great story”. It’s something so terrifying it defies description!

That reality informs Chris’s on-screen life as does the reality of growing up in 2008. Rather than utilizing this specific year for easy nostalgia-bait, Wang instead infuses Dìdi with reminders of the hell of navigating “typical” masculinity in the late 2000s. When we first meet Chris and his friends, they immediately engage in “that’s so gay” jokes. It’s like an immediate shorthand for “hello” between these three boys. While these youngsters titter over declaring things like “your mom is gay”, Wang’s script suggests what kind of behavior Chris is growing up believing is “wrong”. To be vulnerable, to express emotions, that’s “gay”. No wonder Chris subsequently bottles up all his feelings to disastrous consequences.

In Dìdi, 2008 is not a bygone era full of “less sensitivity” that the modern world could take cues from. It’s just another messy slice of the past that Chris grows up in. Simultaneously, Wang shows a level of specificity to growing up in 2008's tech-dominated world only previously seen in one iconic Lasagna Cat short. Short bits of Dìdi briefly evoke Unfriended or Searching in letting Wang’s computer screen fill up the entire screen. Where his cursor hovers or the chirp of AOL messenger notifications stimulates drama in these moments. Focusing exclusively on this computer screen visually encapsulates how important these virtual exchanges and sites like YouTube are to Chris. These things often consume his mind. Dìdi, then, lets these spaces also dominate certain sequences.

The thought Wang’s script puts into Chris’s specifically 2008 plight is exceptional. However, what really stands out in Dìdi is the feature’s approach to Chungsing. There’s such rich empathy in the way Wang and cinematographer Sam A. Davis capture her plight. Take the visual motif of zooming in tight on Chungsing’s face whenever Nai Nai openly chastises her parenting skills. This tight framing brings viewers so close to this woman. Our focus remains on her and nothing else in the room. In these intimate confines, Chen's richly detailed performance offers glimmers of the vulnerable human being underneath that composed exterior. Easily one of the greatest performances of 2024, Joan Chen delivers mesmerizingly lived-in work in Dìdi that can't be missed.

Dìdi’s screenplay also happily allows Chungsing to be more than just the stereotypical nagging mothers populating countless teenager movies. On the contrary, some of the most amusing moments of Wang’s screenplay are Chungsing operating as a humorous figure embarrassing her son through her inexplicable use of umbrellas or accidental flatulence. That quality injects a level of nuance into their dynamic echoing similar intricacy afforded to all these characters. Just look at sullen Chris having a soft spot for his grandmother (whom he reminds is “beautiful”) or Chris and Vivian’s evolving dynamic throughout the film.

This layered screenwriting doesn’t just make for more involving fictional characters. They also capture the endless complexities of teenage social dynamics. At this age, people can go from being friends to enemies in the blink of an eye. It’s just another way Dìdi nicely encapsulates reality within the confines of an emotionally engaging motion picture. It’s especially impressive Wang pulls off that juggling act given that this is his feature-length narrative film directorial debut. Dìdi has, of course, its rough edges that inevitably emerge through an inaugural foray into this kind of cinema. Wang employs a more rudimentary visual approach to a drug trip sequence, for example.

More often than not, though, Wang demonstrates commendable creative audacity in Dìdi. Especially impressive is his dedication to creating a realistically standoff-ish 13-year-old protagonist and the subtle ways Chris grows ashamed of his Taiwanese American identity. Throwaway comments from other people like his crush saying “you’re pretty cute…for an Asian” reinforce why Chris is so quick to withdraw into his hoodie. These elements also further crystallize how growing up really is just torture. Anyone nostalgic for their teenage years must be out of their mind! Luckily, Dìdi is the latest example that at least that miserable stretch of existence can inform some remarkable motion pictures.