By Peter Keough

Like Truffaut, Spielberg, Gerwig, and other renowned auteurs, director Sean Wang has made a deeply felt, funny film that cogently draws on his experiences as a volatile and angsty adolescent.

Didi. Directed by Sean Wang. At the AMC Causeway 13, the Coolidge Corner Theatre, and the suburbs.

Izaac Wang stars as Chris Wang in writer-director Sean Wang’s Didi. Courtesy of Focus Features / Talking Fish Pictures

Dìdi, Sean Wang’s paean to adolescence, the time when everyone seems like an asshole, including oneself, opens with a freeze frame reminiscent of the one that ends Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). It’s a close-up selfie on YouTube of 13-year-old Taiwanese American Chris Wang (or Wang Wang, or Chris, or Dìdi — choosing the right name at the right time is a problem at this age), who is running and laughing hysterically after he and his bros have blown up a neighbor’s mailbox.

Such are the delights available for adolescents in Fremont, California in 2008 (a great town for long shots of a lonely kid wandering the streets at night). Nor is homelife anything to brag about. Played with crusty, charismatic fecklessness by Izaac Wang, Chris (the name he finally settles on) lives with his high-strung, ineptly overprotective mother Chungsing (the great Joan Chen) and his nasty older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen). His father is inexplicably absent, said to be in Taiwan making money for the family. But his father’s mother, the proudly geriatric, incorrigibly intrusive Nai Nai, does live with them (she’s played by Chang Li Hua, whom you might recognize as one of Wang’s own grandmothers in his Oscar-nominated documentary short from last year, Nai Nai and Wài Pó). It’s a corrosive mix, and the first part of the film is in danger of descending into chaotic, cartoonish caterwauling (I mean, urinating into your sister’s moisturizer? A little of this goes a long way.)

Fortunately, or perhaps not, Chris has the internet as a resource to interact socially with others and with the rest of the world. There is the aforementioned YouTube, the now quaint MySpace, a late, daring venture into Facebook, and that old standby, email. Inevitably, a lot of screen time involves looking at screens, and this frames-within-frames narrative device makes for sometimes stodgy exposition. But it does emphasize Chris’s profound anomie and alienation. The film is, up to a point, a process of him seeking out — and sabotaging — human connections beyond the screen.

He starts out with his raffish crew headed by his BFF Farad (Raul Dial), a crudely charming, vaguely sadistic beanpole whose loyalty goes as far as the next cruel practical joke or opportunistic situation. Then there is Madi (Mahaela Park) a girl he is attracted to and who likes him (she tells him he’s cute “for an Asian”). But her interest in him turns out to be for all the wrong reasons — she seems to suffer from the “yellow fever” that another character had joked about earlier. Though  Dìdi  boasts a cast that is admirably multicultural, it does not do so gratuitously but rather confronts the issues of racism that are raised — unlike others in this genre, such as last year’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

Finally, good fortune strikes — a bunch of older skateboarders take him on as a “filmer” and he quickly researches Google for tips on technique. Let’s just say his success in this line of work does not, at least for the time being, achieve the same level as that of the young Spielbergian avatar in The Fabelmans. (To be honest, I found Wang’s film to be more genuine, if less polished, than Spielberg’s bildungsroman.)

One by one his friends list — both virtual and in real life — shrinks and only that last resort, the family, remains. His sister Vivian is a late ally but she is off to college. Nai Nai is largely there for pathos and comic relief. So, as in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017), it all comes down to a final confrontation in the car with mom, one that might end a bit more conclusively than when Chris gets his mother to admit she just farted.

Like Truffaut, Spielberg, Gerwig, and other renowned auteurs, Wang has made a deeply felt, funny film that cogently draws on his experiences as a volatile and angsty adolescent. It remains to be seen in future efforts how much he has grown up.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).