Sundance ‘24: ‘DÌDI’ Comes Of Age in Observant, Rude Dramedy

In his cringe-tastic treatise on middle school awkwardness Eighth Grade, Bo Burnham captured the universal horror of growing up through the specificity of Elsie Fisher’s Kayla. Her oily identity crisis effortlessly evoked our own transitory 13-year-old state, subjecting us to the lost-but-not-forgotten dread of first crushes, online interactions, and seething parental conflict. With Dìdi, Oscar-nominated director Sean Wang does much the same, with more of a skater-punk male juvenile delinquent edge. While the similarities are easy to identify, Dìdi stands on its own as a singular vision of coming-of-age that taps into the universality of being a total dickhead rage monster, because hormones.

The year is 2008 and Taiwanese-American Chris (Izaac Wang) is about to go to high school. With his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) heading to college in the fall, Chris – Dìdi to his first-generation mother (Joan Chen) and Nai Nai (Chang Li Hua) – assumes the role of resident household rebel. This manifests in him blowing up mailboxes with his friends, hanging out with the cooler, older skater kids, fist fighting his peers, and crushing on fellow classmate Madi (Mahaela Park). He completes his rebellious streak by being an absolute jerk to his mother, whose been all but abandoned by the unnamed family patriarch, who is 7,000 miles from home making money.

There’s a sense of anarchical order to Dìdi that suggests a filmmaker composed beyond his years. Wang, who was Academy Award nominated for his short film ‘Năi Nai and Wài Pó’, mines the mainstays of the aughts – AIM messaging, colorful braces elastics, posturing about music and movies – to dig into the underlying hardship of growing up and fitting in. Yes, Dìdi is a menace. He pushes away his close friends to cling to whatever shred of cool crowd acceptance he can find. He’s rude to his family. He’d rather get in physical altercations than talk about his feelings. But he’s also recognizable beneath the sheen of pubescent terror. His at-times-tense, at-times-tender familial connections tease this out in quietly meaningful moments.

We observe Chris in his solitude, typing out – and then deleting – messages that reveal his true self. Someone who is nervous. Sad. Feeling abandoned by his father and college-bound sister. His cruelty to his mother, which explodes late in the film only to regain its tenderness, is a manifestation of his own feelings of misplacement. Wang’s sharply-written and often laugh-out-loud funny script captures the many dimensions of Chris’ awkward attempt to find his place in the world and square that with his existence as a Asian-American. He might largely suck as a student, as a friend, and as a son at this given moment, but Dìdi is far from a lost cause.

Just as Ellie’s awkwardness and angst bellied a deep sense of empathetic right and wrong, Dìdi’s angry outbursts paper over a sadboi who’s desperately stuck between points in his life. There’s warmth beneath the prickliness, hope hiding beyond the loneliness of youth. That Wang’s film can dwell in the in-between while suggesting a path forward is just one of its many magical spells.

CONCLUSION: Writer-director Sean Wang delivers an accomplished and empathic jolt of coming-of-age anguish with Dìdi. The young ensemble cast is phenomenal and funny while the film grapples with the meaningful hardships – and total dickish tendencies – of male growing pains.