With his 2008-set Dìdi, Sean Wang captures the intermingling of adolescent friendship and early social media through the lens of the Asian American diaspora, and with welcome specificity. The importance that a MySpace Top 8 and profile song carries in the world of Chris (Izaac Wang), a 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy, cannot be overstated, nor can the significance of AOL Instant Messenger in sustaining and expanding his friend circle, nor his YouTube channel in allowing him to express his sense of humor.

When it homes in on the disparities and contradictions between Chris’s online and real-life interactions, emotions, and behavior, Dìdi feels nothing short of truthful. Chris is a typically insecure teen, but to such an extreme that he’s almost preternaturally self-sabotaging. And Wang admirably doesn’t shy away from depicting Chris at his most awkward or abhorrent and the myriad ways his behavior alienates him from family and friends,...