Of the movie genres, coming-of-age is, for me, the thorniest; it is a template that invites audience assent on the basis that its story components are poignantly funny because they are recognisably true – ie a quirky unrequited teen love followed by some kind of romantic resolution, crowned by the mature realisation that what really counts is friendship among your peer group. In fact, coming-of-age is in its way as artificial as horror or romcom or Japanese Noh theatre. Real life is far messier and more unsatisfying, and the resolutions of romance or friendship or relations with your parents won’t happen at least until your 20s, if at all.
This makes Sean Wang’s quasi-autobiographical Dìdi (Chinese for “kid brother”) an interesting variation on a theme; I like to think its teen angst and teen friendship is inspired by our own TV classic The Inbetweeners. The setting is Fremont, California in 2008, a world where Facebook is gaining ascendancy over Myspace and kids are uploading skating videos to YouTube. Like Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, this film uses the teen comedy Superbad as a huge pop-cultural marker. (The fact that Superbad stars Jonah Hill may conceivably be intended as a subliminal reminder of Hill’s own slacker-skater film Mid90s, a big influence here.)
Izaac Wang plays Chris, a Taiwanese-American kid in his early teens, who lives with his mum Chungsing, tenderly and sympathetically played by Joan Chen, along with his permanently furious older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) and his grandma and Chungsing’s mother-in-law, Nai Nai. The latter is played by Chang Li Hua, the director’s actual grandmother, featured in his Oscar-nominated documentary short Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó, about his two grandmothers. Chris’s father is away in Taiwan, supposedly to earn money to keep the family afloat – an elephant-in-the-living-room subject from which Chris’s mother distracts herself with her dream of being an artist.
Chris hangs out with his friend group, who say things like: “Your mom is gay” – “She has cancer, dude” – “Can you be gay and have cancer?” He has a massive crush on Madi (Mahaela Park), but their initially promising date turns into an unwatchably cringe-inducing festival of awkwardness, perhaps because she has said he was attractive for an Asian. And when Chris tries hanging out with some supercool skaters, this too becomes a calamity because of his claim that he is only “half-Asian”. He keeps stealing his sister’s clothes (asexual hoodies, etc), although sexuality here looks to be a red herring.
Another type of coming-of-age film would offer neat, emollient endings to it all. Not this one. Chris becomes violent with a bully acquainted with Madi and doesn’t especially regret it. (He has already had a fight with a bigger kid and got a brutal beatdown as a result of biting his opponent’s nipple.) His relationship with Madi is moreover not what you would expect. There is something more conventional in his growing acceptance of his mother, but she does not behave in the accepted way – and neither does his grandmother, who declines to conform to coming-of-age movie rules that she tearjerkingly die for everyone’s cathartic benefit.
Wang’s reserved, undemonstrative performance is what sets the film’s non-sucrose tone: he only really smiles in a goofy video of his much younger self. It’s a cool, downbeat and satisfying piece of work.
• Dìdi is in UK and Irish cinemas from 2 August.
