A nostalgic journey through adolescence: ‘Dìdi’ captures the timeless agony of growing up

A look back at 2008

In 2008, MySpace was the social media giant, flip phones were all the rage, and being a 13-year-old boy was as challenging as ever. Technology has evolved dramatically since then, but as the film Dìdi—a touching and often hilarious coming-of-age story set in the early 2000s—reminds us, the trials and tribulations of adolescence are timeless.

The messy reality of boyhood

“Boyhood is messy,” says Sean Wang, the 30-year-old writer and director of Dìdi, during a Zoom chat from his living room. “The experience of adolescence is pretty consistent across generations. It’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, it garnered some of the festival’s strongest reviews. Many viewers saw themselves in Chris Wang, an awkward Taiwanese American kid growing up in the Bay Area. Chris’s struggle to fit in, his chaotic efforts to be cooler, and his alienation from those who love him most, particularly his mother, are universally relatable. After all, who wasn’t a bit difficult with their parents during high school?

A peek into someone else’s life

Dìdi, which Focus Features will release in theaters on Friday, feels like discovering someone else’s home movies. It’s captivating yet slightly voyeuristic 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 him to make videos of their ollies.

Much of Dìdi was filmed in the skate parks and schoolyards of Fremont, California, where Wang grew up. Other parts of the production blur the line between fact and fiction. Scenes of Chris playing video games and surfing the internet were shot in Wang’s childhood home, with posters and stickers from his teen years still on the walls. Wang’s grandmother plays Chris’s grandma in the film, and his mother served as a de facto location scout. This grassroots approach gives Dìdi a greater sense of authenticity.

Emotional accuracy over autobiography

Wang maintains that Dìdi is emotionally accurate, though not wholly autobiographical. “Not all of it happened, but all of it is true,” he says, borrowing a line from Greta Gerwig. Chris shares a surname with the director but isn’t a carbon copy of his creator. “He’s meeker than I was and a little more self-sabotaging,” Wang says.

The issues Chris grapples with—primarily the vulnerability and self-consciousness of being an Asian American kid at a time when few movie stars, musicians, or athletes looked like 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 we came from.”

The pre-technology technology era

Movies like Stand by Me and The Sandlot captured the intense bonds and fraying innocence of adolescence, but nearly all the actors were white, and the films were set generations before Wang’s time. The technological revolution that has left us addicted to smartphones was still in its nascent stages in 2008, when Dìdi takes place. Wang calls this 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,” Wang says. “When I was a kid, we’d still go out and spend summers on the playground. But at night, we’d go on MySpace or AOL Instant Messenger.”

The challenges of portraying a bygone era

Many of the social networking sites Wang mentions were defunct by the time his young cast hit the scene. Izaac Wang, who plays Chris, struggled with 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.”

Dìdi’s ensemble is largely made up of first-time actors who, despite lacking technical training, understood the joy and confusion of being a teenager. Wang encouraged them to improvise and tell him when something felt false, though he had to edit out anachronistic slang. “There would be so many takes where I’d be like, ‘That was great—just don’t say ‘bad’ or ‘dead-ass,'” Wang says.

Creating a relaxed, authentic atmosphere

To get natural performances, Wang turned the set into a “summer camp” with cotton candy machines and churro trucks. The cast and crew had themed days where they dressed up or participated in talent shows. “We needed to capture this boyish energy,” Wang says. “If the kids wanted to run and jump over fences, my whole thing was, let them.”

A remarkable debut

A lot was riding on Dìdi, Wang’s feature film debut after a series of acclaimed shorts. Joan Chen, who plays Chris’s anxious mother, says the pressure didn’t seem to get to Wang. “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.”

Wang spent seven years shaping the script for Dìdi, assembling the cast and financial backing. In January, he premiered the film at Sundance, where it earned a standing ovation. A few days later, Wang flew back to the Bay Area to watch the Oscar nominations announcement with friends and family. When he learned that his Disney+ documentary short Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó was an Oscar contender, a video of him jumping up and down, embracing his grandmothers and mother, went viral.

A dream come true

The good fortune didn’t stop with the nomination. Wang returned to Sundance to find that Dìdi had landed a distribution deal with Focus Features. The film won the Audience Award and 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, eating Thai takeout.”

For more information and to watch the trailer, visit Dìdi.