On DVD: "Didi"

One of this year's Sundance sensations, Sean Wang's Didi proves a sweet, fond, more than likely autobiographical coming-of-age story, set over the long hot summer of 2008: The Last Days of MySpace might have been one alternative title. I say more than likely autobiographical, because its 13-year-old Taiwanese-American protagonist Chris (played by Izaac Wang), who goes by the name Wang Wang among his contemporaries and Big Wang in chatrooms, is an aspirant filmmaker, uploading rough-hewn skateboarding videos to YouTube; and our actual director casts his actual grandmother (Zhang Li Hua, featured in Wang's Oscar-nominated 2003 short Nai Nai & Wài Pó) as gran to his onscreen surrogate. Much of this Mountain Dew Fabelmans bears a sense of having been lived through in some way: the family specifics (loving, embattled mother Joan Chen, sassier older sister Shirley Chen), the bristling friendgroup (lots of fucked-your-mom cracks, pranks, Superbad as sacred text), a wider adolescent grossness (Chris peeing in his sister's beauty products, the use of chatrooms to disseminate dodgy links, untimely tumescences, some business with a dead rodent). Much of it contrives to wrap the viewer in the warm hug of nostalgia, and I can see those among us who were 13 in 2008 proclaiming Didi the greatest film of their young lifetimes. It's not short on pop-cultural pleasures for the rest of us, too: if you needed a film to demonstrate the significance of Paramore or to remind you how comparatively clean the Internet was (in design, at least, shorn of scammers and spambots) even as recently as sixteen years ago, you need look no further.

In some way, Wang is following a tried-and-tested career path, lionising his generation much as George Lucas did in 1973's American Graffiti and Richard Linklater did with 1993's Dazed and Confused. (It's just that the hangout spot of choice has shifted online, no longer the diner or football field but messageboards and IM chat windows.) That Didi felt flimsier to me than either of those examples is down to what feels like fairly rote Sundance scripting, setting out experience without shape or much in the way of dramatic roughage. Wang constructs the film as a series of pivotal moments: a sister going off to college; MySpace dying, Facebook speeding up to take its place; Chris falling out with his childhood friends, and in with some older boys. It's vaguely novel that our focal point should be kind of a weirdo: that Didi remains likable has much to do with the way Wang cops to having once been a massive dork and ingrate. Yet any drama here feels like a done deal. We know this kid survived to tell these tales, and the prevailing geniality reassures us nothing unduly terrible is going to befall his younger incarnation, however brattily he may act up. (The more revealing comparison point may not be The Fabelmans, rather James Gray's Armageddon Time.) The stronger material and performances fade into the background: the mother's thwarted dreams of becoming a painter, for example, most touchingly articulated by Chen whenever Didi isn't too busy at the skatepark hunting for LOLs. Somewhere in here, there's a recognition that the son has been given an opportunity his mother never had: the older Wang sees it, and is grateful for it, but can't develop it on screen beyond the occasional poignant gesture. As a result, Didi settles benignly into the cinematic centre ground, a bean bag for viewers to collapse into at the end of the working day. It's not unpleasant at all, but also not as distinctive as Sundance may have framed it as. I also wonder whether this is another example of a movie that's been trumped by TV - and more specifically Fresh Off the Boat, the great Nahnatchka Khan's adaptation of Eddie Huang's memoir of growing up Taiwanese-American in the Florida of the 1990s. Wang gives good hugs, but Khan and Huang added big laughs and unexpected insights.

Didi is available on DVD via Mediumrare from Monday.