Family comes above everything else, this is something that many people believe and say, an old adage that, regardless of one’s age and race, people sometimes forget. That person losing his way is Chris ‘Didi’ Wang (Izaac Wang), a Taiwanese-American living in Fremont, California. He is forgetting family and is instead navigating both the online and IRL spheres of teen life. As an aside, one of the things that make Sean Wang’s Didi perfect is its depiction of online life during 2008, where young people use platforms like AIM to make and break their fragile friendships. In real life though, he’s making some headway, especially with a white girl, Maddie.

Maddie initiates hangouts with Chris, the kind of thing that teenage boys dream of until it happens. Of course he’s going to mess that up by lying to his friends about the relationship. He’s also ingratiating himself with a group of skaters, lying to them about his skills as a ‘filmer’. He also tells them that he’s a half-Asian instead of a full Asian. These blunders are getting him closer with his sister, Vivian (Shirley Chen), who is off to college. But it’s driving him further away from his mother (an award worthy Joan Chen), who has her own frustrations with her hilariously neurotic mother-in-law, Nai Nai (Chang Li Hua, who also appeared in Wang’s Oscar nominated documentary short, Nai Nai and Wai Po).

Didi makes me thank God that They didn’t make me straight. I was annoying as an Asian gay teen and I can say something similar about myself now, but a straight me would be insufferable. Watching this is like looking in the mirror, and maybe the differences aren’t so slight as Chris practises middle school levels of misogyny, nothing that one can’t deprogram from him. He’s an ‘unsympathetic’ male protagonist but thankfully, not a caricature. Chris is a character experiencing life in between, feeling every emotion that comes with growing pains and losing friends.

Of course, Didi is a character study for Chris, but it perfectly gives nuances even to the film’s minor characters. As a director, Wang depicts all of these characters with the right kind of frenetic energy and tonal arcs. The cinematography here is also subtle, the perfect kind of colour grading that takes viewers back to the 2000s. The film makes us feel every time Chris wants to crawl out of his skin and run away from everyone. Going back to character work, other films have messed up coming of age stories before with their insular groupthink. This film, instead, treats its protagonist and its supporting characters with a kindness that I wish more films would practise.

Didi comes out in select Canadian theatres in the year of our Lord (Beyoncé) 2024.