The first film I watched through my fingers this year was not Longlegs or The Watchers—or anything close to a horror movie. It was Dìdi (弟弟), a coming-of-age indie I caught in January at the Sundance Film Festival, about a 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy doing 13-year-old-boy things. Much of Dìdi, which will be released in theaters nationwide this week, is tender and wonderfully charming. Because it’s set in 2008, it also re-creates the nascent days of social media in uncannily accurate detail. Seeing the film’s protagonist, Chris (played by Izaac Wang), log in to AOL Instant Messenger spiked my blood pressure. Watching him open a chat window to talk to his crush—only to backspace and rewrite his opening salvo to her over and over—made me cringe in worry for his well-being and, yes, cover my face with my hands.
Maybe that sounds extreme, but anyone who grew up during the peak years of AIM, Myspace, and Facebook probably remembers the visceral terror of making decisions about your every keystroke online. Building profile pages, choosing your Top 8 friends, curating the right collection of favorite films and bands so you’d seem cool—this was stomach-churning stuff for a teenager. I remember the first time I tried to flirt on AIM; I signed out in a panic.
As a crowd-pleasing portrait of adolescent angst, Dìdi—this year’s Sundance Audience Award winner—has drawn comparisons to films such as Eighth Grade, Lady Bird, and Mid90s. To an extent, these comparisons make sense: Chris, like the subjects of those movies, wants to stand out for who he is while also fitting in with everyone else. But Dìdi sets itself apart by examining more than just the turbulence of growing pains; it’s also a period piece that understands the flattening effect the internet has on teenagers in particular. The “screen life” format, which tracks a character’s actions exclusively via digital interfaces, has been deployed in films such as Searching and Missing as a nifty device for immersing an entire plot in the digital world, but here it’s used only in key sequences, and captures the particular confusion experienced by a generation of kids who spent their formative years interacting through social media. Dealing with crushes and overbearing parents is child’s play, Dìdi suggests, compared with figuring out how to define yourself online when you’re not even sure how to define yourself in real life.
On that front, Chris struggles with more problems than many of his peers. Growing up in the Northern California suburb of Fremont, he’s self-conscious about not being white, despite going to school with other Asian kids. His friends’ nickname for him is “Wang-Wang,” but when he’s somewhere a Caucasian Chris is present, he becomes “Asian Chris.” At home, meanwhile, he’s just the titular “dìdi,” a Mandarin term of endearment that means “little brother.” As a result, Chris desperately tries not to become an outcast, slipping in and out of traits he thinks will appeal to others—something made more possible by his being online. At a party, he changes his ringtone to a song by a band he noticed his crush liked on her Myspace. When his childhood friends start to drift away from him, he latches on to a group of skateboarders, claiming that he has extensive experience filming tricks, before racing home to study such videos on YouTube.
Many of these moments are played for laughs, but Dìdi understands that even though so much information was available to anyone with an internet connection, a 13-year-old will inevitably search for the wrong things and ask the wrong questions. At a time when everyone was more available than ever—to be messaged, poked, and stalked—it was terribly easy for a kid like Chris to get lost. Take the way he hesitates over choosing a Facebook profile photo: Should he lean into the skateboarding thing? Should he be making a goofy face? And consider how he struggles with the idea that his most obvious quality—the fact that he’s Asian—tends to dominate people’s impression of him. When he’s told that he’s “cute for an Asian,” he’s not sure whether to take it as a compliment. On the internet, his race is an unavoidable identifier, no matter what picture he selects.
Dìdi is semi-autobiographical; while writing the script, the writer-director Sean Wang, who was nominated for an Oscar this year for the short film Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, drew on his experiences growing up in Fremont, and incorporated plenty of personal touches into the filmmaking process. Scenes in Chris’s bedroom were shot in Wang’s own childhood bedroom, with the posters still on the walls. Wang’s real-life grandmother Zhang Li Hua plays Chris’s. But Dìdi feels most authentic when it shows how the chaos of Chris’s internet consumption seeps into his offline life. Chris imagines a conversation with his pet fish, for example, as well as an encounter with a squirrel he and his buddies once used to prank a neighbor for a video—absurd flourishes that recall the irreverent humor of the late-2000s, Flash-animation-dominated internet. By blurring the line between the digital and the analog, the film captures how unmooring it felt to be a teenager in 2008, struggling to separate your social-media self from flesh and blood.
That loose sensibility does yield a film that can feel somewhat formless, playing like an eclectic album of snapshots from Chris’s life rather than a cohesive whole. Even so, that lack of structure feels true to a teenager’s perspective: Like a lot of kids in 2008, Chris is all over the place online and off, overlooking how, amid his fumbling around for a perfect profile, he’s not alone in feeling overwhelmed. His mother, Chungsing (an affecting Joan Chen), initially hovers on the margins of the film, anxiously trying to keep the peace in a household containing of a pair of bickering siblings—Chris’s older sister has her own share of teenage grievances—and a mother-in-law with an inexhaustible arsenal of critiques. But as the film progresses, Wang subtly draws parallels between Chungsing and her son. Like him, she worries about how she’s perceived and questions who she is, now that she spends most of her time as her family’s caretaker instead of living the life she once had as a painter.
Dìdi exudes a special kind of empathy and warmth toward the kids who grew up in the age of Myspace, as well as their families. Many coming-of-age stories examine a child’s relationship with themselves and their parents, but Dìdi also tracks how those shifts were made more jarring and strange in the early days of social media. It’s a love letter to the world of Top 8s and status updates, an apology to beleaguered parents everywhere, and, perhaps for Wang, an embrace of his younger self’s disorientation. It may be obvious to anyone now that building a Myspace profile could never convey a person’s full self. But back then, it seemed important to try—and good fun, in all its mess, while it lasted.
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