Back in 2008, MySpace was cool, flip phones were the norm, and it was kind of boring to be a 13-year-old. The experience has changed a lot since then, but as “Dìdi” — a touching and consistently hilarious coming-of-age story set in the early 2000s — reminds us, the agony and indignity of being a teenager are timeless.
“Childhood is messy,” says Sean Wang, the film’s 30-year-old writer and director, just wanting to escape childhood as he chats on Zoom from his living room. “And the experience of adolescence is pretty consistent across generations. That’s why I can watch ‘400 Blows’ — a movie made before I was even born — and see myself in it.”
When “Dìdi” premiered at Sundance in January, where it received one of the strongest reviews of the competition, many people saw themselves in Chris Wang, an awkward Taiwanese-American kid growing up in the Bay Area. As he struggles to fit in, Chris drifts away from his family and friends, stumbling toward something cooler that’s simply out of reach. But his chaotic endeavors, which always end with him alienating the people who love him most, most notably his mother, feel so relatable. After all, who wasn’t a shit to their mom in high school?
“Didi,” which Focus Options will release in theaters on Friday, is akin to discovering someone else’s home movies. It’s fascinating, but it also feels a bit like eavesdropping as you watch Chris during his last month of summer vacation, harassing his college-bound sister at the dinner table, ruining his first kiss and trading in one set of friends for a bunch of older skaters who want the camera-wielding kid to film his ollies.
Much of “Dìdi” was filmed inside the skate parks and schoolyards of Fremont, California, where Wang grew up; different elements of the production further blur the line between reality and fiction. Check out Chris’s bedroom: sscenes of him playing video games and surfing the Internet were filmed in Wang’s childhood home, with posters and stickers from his teenage years still on the walls. And the production was a family affair in more ways than one. Wang’s grandmother doubles as Chris’s grandmother in the film, and his mother served as a de facto location scout. Some of this can be attributed to the sobering realities of shooting a low-budget indie, but more importantly, it gives “Dìdi” a greater authenticity.
“Sean wanted this to really feel like a grassroots filmmaking effort, and he really wanted his neighborhood to get involved,” says Carlos López Estrada, a producer on the film. “He wanted the film to have this tactile, raw vitality. And you don’t get that by saying, ‘Hey, here’s Hollywood coming to Fremont.’ We wanted to come back to the city with open arms, ready to receive any help and assistance we could get.”
Wang maintains that “Dìdi” is emotionally accurate but not entirely autobiographical. “Not all of it happened, but all of it is true,” he says, borrowing a line from Greta Gerwig, whose film “Girl Chook,” loosely inspired by her youth in Sacramento, would make a great double feature with “Dìdi.” For instance, though Chris shares a last name with the director, he is not a carbon copy of his creator. “He’s more gentle than I used to be, and a little more self-destructive,” Wang says.
But the issues Chris struggled with—particularly the vulnerability and self-consciousness that comes with being an Asian-American kid at a time when almost none of the movie stars, musicians, or athletes he idolizes look like him—were real. “As a kid, I was an outsider among outsiders,” Wang says. “I was surrounded by people who looked like me, but society and tradition in general didn’t reflect the world we came from.”
Consider films like “Stand by Me” and “The Sandlot,” which Wang loved for how they best captured the extraordinary bonds, in-jokes and frayed innocence that underscore the transition from childhood to adolescence. Nearly all of the actors in these films are white. And the films themselves are set generations before Wang came of age and long before the internet and social media began to reshape society. That process was underway in 2008, when “Dìdi” takes place, but the technological revolution that has left us all hooked on our smartphones and fully immersed in a web-based world was still in its early stages. Wang likes to call the period “the pre-technology savvy period.”
“The web was a huge part of my upbringing, but not in the way that Instagram or TikTok really are, where they’re in everyone’s bones,” Wang says. “When I was a kid, we would still go out and spend our summers on the playground and have these aimless days. But when you got home at night, you would immediately go on MySpace or AOL Instant Messenger or YouTube.”
Most of the social media sites Wang cites were already defunct when his younger cast arrived on the scene. Izaac Wang, who plays Chris, had only a passing knowledge of them, but the he What he struggled with probably the most on set was the flip phone his character uses. “I couldn’t figure that thing out for the life of me,” he says. “I couldn’t sort it or text on it at all. I was so slow. I just gave up, to the point where when we didn’t want it anymore, I threw it out the window. Well, not likely, but metaphorically.”
The “Dìdi” ensemble is mostly first-time actors, but while they lacked technical training, they acutely understood the joy and confusion of being young. Wang inspired them to improvise and to let him know when something felt fake — though he had to edit them when the slang they used was anachronistic. “There could be so many takes where I would say, ‘That was cool — just don’t say ‘dangerous’ or ‘dumb-ass,’” Wang says.
To get performances that felt pure, Wang transformed the set into what he called a “summer camp.” There were cotton candy machines and churro vehicles; the cast and crew would have themed days where they would dress up or participate in talent shows. The concept was to create a free, relaxed vibe so that kids could be kids. “We wanted to capture that youthful vitality,” Wang says. “I didn’t want everyone to just sit around and wait for us to do the next set-up. If kids wanted to run around and jump over fences and stuff, my goal was to let them.”
There was a lot riding on “Dìdi,” which marks Wang’s feature debut after a string of acclaimed shorts. Yet Joan Chen, the veteran actress who plays Chris’s anxious mother, says the tension didn’t seem to affect the director. “He never raised his voice,” she says. “He wasn’t even 30 when we did it, but he just seemed so mature. He had this calm confidence.”
That familiar conviction comes to the fore as Wang talks about the seven years he spent crafting the script for “Dìdi,” then gathering financial backing and forging a film. But sometimes even Wang can’t grasp how much his life has changed. In January, he premiered “Dìdi” at Sundance, where it received a standing ovation. A few days later, Wang flew back to his home in the Bay Area. “Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó,” a Disney+ documentary short he made about his grandmothers, was being considered an Oscar contender, and he wanted to watch the nominations announcement with his family and friends. Just before press time, his sister encouraged him to get out of his pajamas so they could share what they hoped would be a big moment. When Wang realized he was an Oscar nominee, a video of him jumping up and down, ecstatically hugging his grandmothers and mother, went viral. “I’m so happy my sister let me put some clothes on,” he says.
The good fortune didn’t end with the nomination. Wang flew back to Sundance to find that “Didi” had landed a distribution deal with Focus Options, the independent studio behind “The Holdovers” and “Belfast.” He stuck around to see his film win not only the Audience Award but also an award for its cast. “You’re like, OK, let me feel grounded,” Wang marvels. “Let me make sure the ground is still there.”
Wang still can’t imagine that all this happened. he — that this stranger had become the hit of independent cinema.
“There just seemed to be an incredibly large gap between what had just happened to me and the best way I perceived myself,” he says. “Because I’m still the man sitting in my messy room, you know, eating Thai takeout.”