Back in 2008, MySpace was cool, flip phones were popular and it kinda sucked to be a 13-year-old boy. Technology has changed a lot since then, but as “Dìdi” — a touching, frequently hilarious coming-of-age story that unfolds in the early aughts — reminds us, the agony and indignity of being a teenager is timeless.
“Boyhood is messy,” says Sean Wang, the film’s 29-year-old writer and director, looking barely out of boyhood himself as he chats on Zoom from his living room. “And the experience of adolescence is pretty consistent across the generations. It’s why I can watch ‘400 Blows’ — a movie made before I was even born — and see myself in it.”
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When “Dìdi” premiered at Sundance in January, where it earned some of the festival’s strongest reviews, lots of people saw themselves in Chris Wang, an awkward Taiwanese American kid growing up in the Bay Area. As he struggles to fit in, Chris twists away from his friends and family, lurching toward something cooler that’s just out of reach. But his chaotic efforts, which always end with him alienating the people who love him most, particularly his mother, feel so relatable. After all, who wasn’t shitty to their mom in high school?
“Dìdi,” which Focus Features will release in theaters on Friday, is akin to discovering someone else’s home movies. It’s captivating, but it also feels a little like spying as you watch Chris during his last month of summer break, harassing his college-bound sister at the dinner table, botching his first kiss, and exchanging one set of friends for a group of older skaters who want the camera-wielding kid to make videos of their ollies.
Much of “Dìdi” was filmed in the skate parks and schoolyards of Fremont, Calif., where Wang grew up; other parts of the production further blur the line between fact and fiction. Take Chris’ room: Scenes of him playing video games and surfing the internet were shot in Wang’s childhood home, with the posters and stickers from the director’s teen years still on the walls. And the production was a family affair in other ways. Wang’s grandmother acts as Chris’ grandma in the film, and his mother served as a de facto location scout. Some of that can be chalked up to the practical realities of shooting a low-budget indie, but more important, it gives “Dìdi” greater authenticity.
“Sean wanted this to feel like a grassroots filmmaking effort, and he really wanted his community to get involved,” says Carlos López Estrada, a producer on the film. “He wanted the movie to have this tactile, raw energy. And you don’t get that by going, ‘Hey, here’s Hollywood hitting Fremont.’ We needed to come into the city with open arms, ready to welcome any help and support we could get.”
Wang maintains that “Dìdi” is emotionally accurate, yet not wholly autobiographical. “Not all of it happened, but all of it is true,” he says, borrowing a line from Greta Gerwig, whose film “Lady Bird,” loosely inspired by her youth in Sacramento, would make an ideal double feature with “Dìdi.” For example, though Chris shares a surname with the director, he isn’t a carbon copy of his creator. “He’s meeker than I was, and a little more self-sabotaging,” Wang says.
Yet the issues that Chris tussles with — primarily the vulnerability and self-consciousnessthat come with being an Asian American kid at a time when barely any of the movie stars, musicians or athletes he idolizes resemble him — were true to life. “Growing up, I was an outsider among outsiders,” Wang says. “I was surrounded by people who looked like me, but society and culture at large didn’t reflect the world that we came from.”
Take movies like “Stand by Me” and “The Sandlot,” which Wang loved for the way they captured the intense bonds, in-jokes and fraying innocence that underline the transition between childhood and adolescence. Nearly all the actors who populate those films are white. And the movies themselves are set generations before Wang came of age and long before the internet and social media started reshaping society. That process was underway in 2008, when “Dìdi” takes place, but the technological revolution that left all of us addicted to our smartphones and fully immersed in an online world was still in its nascent stages. Wang likes to callthe period the “pre-technology technology era.”
“The internet was a big part of my upbringing, but not in the way that Instagram or TikTok are now, where they’re in everyone’s bones,” Wang says. “When I was a kid, we’d still go out and spend summers on the playground and have these aimless days. But when you’d get home at night, you’d immediately go on MySpace or AOL Instant Messenger or YouTube.”
Many of the social networking sites that Wang name-checks were defunct by the time his young cast hit the scene. Izaac Wang, who plays Chris, had only a passing knowledge of them, but the thing he struggled with 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 type or text on it at all. I was so slow. I just gave up, to the point where when we didn’t need it anymore, I threw it out the window. Well, not really, but metaphorically.”
“Dìdi’s” ensemble is largely made up of first-time actors, but even though they lacked technical training, they understood acutely the joy and confusion of being a teenager. Wang encouraged them to improvise and to tell him when something felt false — though he had to edit them when the slang they used was anachronistic. “There would be so many takes where I’d be like, ‘That was great — just don’t say ‘bad’ or ‘dead-ass,’” Wang says.
To get performances that felt natural, Wang turned the set into what he called “summer camp.” There were cotton candy machines and churro trucks; the cast and crew would have themed days where they’d dress up or participate in talent shows. The idea was to create a loose, relaxed vibe so the kids could be kids. “We needed to capture this boyish energy,” Wang says. “I didn’t just want everybody to sit around and wait for us to do the next setup. “If the kids wanted to run and jump over fences and stuff, my whole thing was, let them.”
A lot was riding on “Dìdi,” which marks Wang’s feature film debut after a series of acclaimed shorts. But Joan Chen, the veteran actress who plays Chris’ anxious mother, says the pressure didn’t seem to get to the director. “He never raised his voice,” she says. “He wasn’t even 30 when we made this, but he just seemed so mature. He had this calm confidence.”
That steady conviction comes through as Wang talks about the seven years he spent shaping the script for “Dìdi,” then assembling the cast and financial backing. Yet at times even Wang can’t quite wrap his head around how much his life has changed. In January, he premiered “Dìdi” at Sundance, where it earned 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 that he had made about his grandmothers, was seen as an Oscar contender, and he wanted to watch the nominations announcement with friends and family. Just before the broadcast started, his sister urged him to change out of his pajamas so they could record what they hoped would be a big moment. When Wang learned that he was an Academy Award nominee, a video of him jumping up and down, ecstatically embracing his grandmothers and mother, went viral. “I’m so happy my sister convinced me to put some clothes on,” he says.
The good fortune didn’t stop with the nomination. Wang flew back to Sundance to find that “Dìdi” had landed a distribution deal with Focus Features, the indie studio behind “The Holdovers” and “Belfast.” He stayed there to see his movie win not only the Audience Award, but also a prize for its ensemble cast. “You’re just like, OK, let me feel grounded,” Wang marvels. “Let me make sure the earth is still there.”
Wang still can’t believe all this happened to him — that this outsider had become the toast of the indie movie business.
“There just seemed to be a really big distance from what had just happened to me and the way I saw myself,” he says. “Because I’m still the guy sitting in my messy room, you know, eating Thai takeout.”
