Dìdi movie review & analysis: A love letter to an Asian-American childhood

Dìdi is an autobiographical romp through the life of a shy 13-year-old Taiwanese-American as he tries to find his place in the summer before high school.

As a second generation Asian-American, watching Dìdi, Taiwanese-American director Sean Wang's own ode to his childhood, was an entertaining, affirming, slightly cringy, but healing experience. Wang takes threads about boyhood and the Asian-American diaspora and the American dream and race and releases them. Not to remove them from his narrative, but to feel at peace. I'm not sure whether the story of Dìdi is something Wang experienced first hand or is simply a way to work through his own generational traumas, but what he did was heal mine just a bit. If anything, just to be known and seen for 90 minutes.

Dìdi is in theaters now.

There's been a spate of 90s and 2000s-set coming-of-age dramedies in recent years, a result of millennial filmmakers being old enough to tell the stories of their childhoods. There's Greta Gerwig's Sacramento love letter Lady Bird and Jonah Hill's slacker skater romp Mid90s or Kelly Fremont Craig's meditation of teenage girlhood The Edge of Seventeen and Bo Burnham's anxious pseudo-horror Eighth Grade. But I've never seen myself reflected back by any of those movies. Sometimes, I'd see shadows of myself in the awkwardness of adolescence, but never something that made me feel known and seen. That's why as a second generation Asian-American watching Dìdi, Taiwanese-American director Sean Wang's own ode to his childhood, was an entertaining, affirming, slightly cringy, but healing experience.

Wang too seems to be healing through the story. It is a semi-autobiographical look at his childhood growing up in the suburbs of the Bay Area.

The fictionalized version of himself Chris (Izaac Wang)—dìdi is a Chinese term for “little brother”—is a shy, acne-suffering 13-year-old facing down the summer before his first year of high school. He and his older sister Vivan (Shirley Chen) lob verbal insults at each other like grenades while he has a gentler touch with his grandmother (Chang Li Hua), his father's mother, who he films with his camcorder and assures her she's beautiful.

While Chris is quiet compared to his friends Fahad (Raul Dial) and Jimmy (Aaron Chang), it doesn't stop him from chasing what he believes to be the ideal life. Whether it's trying (and mostly failing) to impress his crush Madi (Mahaela Park) or becoming friends with a group of cool skaters that he offers to film videos for. The way Wang recreates the late-2000s is impressive as he finds ways to seamlessly incorporate the online world into real life. Entire plot moments happen online and decisions made in the virtual space affect what is happening in the real world. Like when Chris takes a look at one of his friend's top eight on MySpace and finds his name missing or when instead of admitting to his crush he was embarrassed by something over AOL Instant Messenger he blocks her or how a simple comment on a Facebook photo can send you into a spiral. The impact of doing (or not doing) something online has as much impact as in the physical world. Dìdi captures the anxiety around that with painful relatability.

As we watch Chris hang out with friends (who he often questions the loyalty of), go to parties (he's not sure he's wanted at), and try different versions of himself to fit in, we also get insight into his insecurities. While many coming-of-age movies lean into the stupidity-driven debauchery of youth, Dìdi presupposes that all of that bravado is an act to feel like you belong or are cool or are simply normal. It's how the movie is inseparably tied to its Asian identity. Chris tries to separate himself from his identity perceiving it as something to be ashamed of. At one point, he even lies that he is half-white. Wang never dwells on those details for long, rather letting their impact linger. That theme is what drives so much of the movie's story even in its comfortable plotlessness.

However, like many movies in the subgenre, Dìdi is all about his mother.

They have a contentious relationship like any parent and their teen. He sees her as unable to understand him and any attempt to as suffocating. When she pushes him to enroll in an SAT course, he sees it as a slight against his intelligence. When she asks him about a video he's watching on YouTube, he diminishes her curiosity as manipulative.

However, we also get to see shades of the life that Chungsing Wang (Joan Chen, best known as Josie Packard in Twin Peaks) leads in the periphery of Chris's story. She struggles against constant criticism from her mother-in-law who accuses her of letting the household fall into disarray while her husband and Chris's father is away for work. We get insight into her dream deferred to be an artist—she shows Chris one of her paintings she wanted to submit in a competition which he so eloquently calls “ugly as shit”.

It all comes to a head in a scene between the two that feels like it tears into years of generational trauma—and dispels it.

With maternal warmth but steadfast female strength, Joan Chen delivers the movie's thesis—and catharsis. It's an argument for her to receive her first Oscar nomination. The surprisingly simple scene delivers on the promise of all the movie's threads about boyhood and the Asian-American diaspora and the American dream and race and releases them. Not to remove them from his narrative, but to feel at peace. I'm not sure whether the story of Dìdi is something Wang experienced first hand or is simply a way to work through his own generational traumas, but what he did was heal mine just a bit. If anything, just to be known and seen for 90 minutes.

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Hey! I'm Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I'm also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

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Karl Delossantos

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Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.