Dìdi review – a tender, specific rendering of adolescence on the early internet

It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at nostalgia, so often is fondness for the past used to cover a lack of anything to say. The market is flush with reboots, redos, reunions and the Eras tour, content mining our natural affinity for (and thus, the bankability of) things that shaped us.

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What a joy, then, that this year’s Sundance film festival featured not one but several films that accomplished the rare and difficult task of employing nostalgia without feeling cheap, that pulled us backwards to sharp, smart, devastating and illuminating effect. Megan Park’s My Old Ass conjured the excitement and overwhelm of leaving home via a bittersweet, mushroom-induced meeting between an 18-year-old girl and her 39-year-old self. Jane Schoenbrun’s buzzy, word-of-mouth hit I Saw the TV Glow resurrected the thrill of analog TV fandom via its own Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque TV show, for a haunting tale of obsession, identity and fandom. Both film-makers understood that when done well, there are few things more powerful in art than our feelings around the passage of time.

So too in Dìdi, Sean Wang’s semi-autobiographical portrait of an Asian American boy in 2008 that is easily one of the best, most seamless films I’ve seen on the experience of growing up online. Dìdi has a clear antecedent in fellow Sundance alum Eighth Grade, Bo Burnham’s 2018 film about a girl’s phone-inflected adolescence that is still the gold standard for affecting films about the internet. The tones are strikingly similar – understated and natural, sweet and bitingly sour, observing the ordinary thrills and horrors of growing up. Both braid the digital lives of their protagonists with striking accuracy – Facebook photo albums and comments, Snapchat stories and Instagram faces, overlaid with longing, loneliness and occasional fun.

Dìdi is the childhood nickname for Chris Wang (Izaac Wang), a Taiwanese American kid in Fremont, California, stranded in between middle and high school. He’s adrift in his family – his mostly absent father is away on business in Taiwan; his strained mother (Joan Chen) stuck in a thankless role as stay-at-home mom and caretaker to her judgmental mother-in-law (Chang Li Hua). His sharp-tongued sister, Vivian (Shirley Chen), weeks away from her freshman year of college at UCSD, is four years apart but a world away in his understanding.

Chris is a very familiar type of lost between friends, crushes and embarrassments, hampered by a nascent sense of shame at his own difference. His eighth-grade friends believably communicate via janky YouTube videos, slang and slurs pushing the boundaries of what they can get away with. Wang is spot-on specific with the adolescent parlance of time – the casual homophobic slur, “that’s gangstaaaa (:” on a Facebook wall, plenty of jokes about race. Chris’s friends are a diverse bunch, but all make comments on his race, well-meaning or otherwise. “You’re pretty cute, for an Asian,” says his crush, Madi (Mahaela Park), in one of the film’s most quietly devastating scenes. As Chris, Izaac Wang is remarkably naturalistic and heart-piercingly vulnerable – you know that line will sting for a long, long time.

Dìdi is peppered with the easy period signifiers – a Motorola Krzr flip phone, the movie Superbad, Paramore – and also the more specific, tricky details that are hard to nail but, when done with as much curiosity and research as here, mesmerizing. I’m admittedly the target age for this, having also spent the summer of 2008 languishing between middle school and high school, nervously checking AIM and pretending to like the Mandy Moore weepie A Walk to Remember to fit in. If Chris’s initial, formative years on the internet map on to yours, then the effect of Wang’s dabbling in desktop cinema is triggering, in the literal sense of memory boxes unlocking; the shock of familiarity that is the Microsoft XP pipes screensaver, Myspace top friends and “summer 08 xD” Facebook photo albums is arresting, these throwaway things that yet once consumed so much emotional energy.

Dìdi has a deft handle on the era-nonspecific teenage angst and turmoil as well, enough that one needn’t to be from the class of 2012 to relate to how Chris’s world opens up, via filming videos for a group of older teens, and crumbles around feelings of shame, inadequacy and the devastation that is being left out. The costumes, setting, computer interfaces and music are all scarily accurate to 2008, a testament to Wang’s airtight hold on this particular strange, liminal period – not just between childhood and adolescence, but between early YouTube and smartphones, Myspace and social media dominance. But its tender blend of emotions is evergreen. Dìdi’s final touching, soft note of growth – so much internalized and overcome already, so much to go – would be moving in any year.

• Dìdi is showing at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution