Nine reasons to see Didi

Sean Wang's Sundance Award-winning coming-of-age film is a joy and one of the year's most promising directorial debuts. Here are some of the reasons I enjoyed it so much.

Thirteen-year-old Chris is figuring himself out before a captive audience. [Image from the Focus Features trailer.]

9.

Something’s working when a guy my age is relating so much to a film about a teenager from such a different time, with so many different challenges. Holy handicams, Batman — this movie brings things back! The best moments of my teen years… and the worst.

I’ve never been to Fremont, California, and I was three times Chris’s age in 2008, so the specifics of his day-to-day routines are very different than what I remember of being thirteen years old. And yet, I felt drawn right into that time and place without ever feeling like the film is too excited or show-offy about its period specificity.

I’ve never skateboarded, but Chris’s adventure in meeting and filming skateboarders felt effortlessly authentic.

While I made goofy videos with my friends in high school, they required so much heavy lifting that such adventures were rare, and we had no way to embarrass ourselves in front of the world the way these kids do; still, the creative impulses, the playful escapism, the reckless rebellions that end in regret—all of it rings true.

I’ve never investigated a crush of mine on social media, but watching Chris’s investigative endeavors on MySpace felt weirdly familiar; it’s probably exactly what I would have done in his place at his age. When a movie introduces you to unfamiliar people in an unfamiliar environment and enchants you so gracefully, inspiring such swift and affecting empathy, something is really working.

Was your first kiss — or your first opportunity for one — as awkwardly stressful as this scene? [Image from the Focus Features trailer.]

8.

Didi is the directorial debut of Sean Wang, who shows great promise here. He also wrote and produced it, and he took home the Sundance Audience Award for it. I suspect it’s very personal project for him. “Chris” is a singular character, one that persuades me he must have a great deal of Sean Wang in him. Rather than trying to serve up an “Asian-American adolescence representation film,” Wang gives us an intimate focus on an idiosyncratic boy dealing with familiar fears, peer pressures, and family struggles in a way that will feel familiar to most viewers, even as its lived-experience particularity makes every scene interesting.