The first billion-dollar film of the year was Inside Out 2 (2024). This film, written and directed by Sean Wang, is basically a live-action version, minus the anthropomorphized emotions. The basic story of Inside Out 2 is a teenager who is in the summer before she goes to a new school has to decide whether she's going to stick with her old friends or try to impress a new group of friends. A lot of Inside Out 2 pivots over the sport of hockey. Wang's film has that same premise, except the teenager is an Asian boy and the sport in question is skateboarding. Both films are even set in the San Francisco Bay Area. Both films are essentially coming-of-age narratives. Inside Out 2 has a fantastical element and is obviously animated, but it's unique in that there aren't many coming-of-age stories centered on a girl or young woman. Similarly, there aren't many that center on someone of Asian descent.
Justin Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) and Andrew Ahn's Spa Night (2016) focus on teenagers who are older than the protagonist here who isn't even in high school yet. The closet comparison might be to Lee Isaac Chung's Minari (2020), but the boy in that film was only 8-years-old, which is perhaps too young for a traditional coming-of-age narrative. Minari was also more focused on the family in general and the father more specifically. Here, the young protagonist is the only male in the family, so the focus can be more on him in that regard.
Izaac Wang (Clifford the Big Red Dog and Raya and the Last Dragon) stars as Chris Wang, a 13-year-old boy living in Fremont, California, in the summer of 2008. He's likely Taiwanese. He has a group of young guys who are his best friends whom he's probably known since elementary school and has likely grown up knowing. They hang out together, having fun before they start high school in a couple of months. Like most pre-teens and even teen boys, they're becoming more and more obsessed with girls and having sex, as well as posturing and being macho or seeming cool. However, Chris is probably the least macho, the least charismatic and the least likely to have sex of all those in his friend group. He clearly wants to change that, but he has a lot of anxiety, as depicted in Inside Out 2.
His main outlet is creating videos. For Chris in 2008, it's only been a few years since the launch of YouTube, but Chris has already starting posting a ton of clips to that website. Most of those clips are Chris and his friends doing silly or juvenile things, as well as random, funny or embarrassing moments. He doesn't talk much in real-life, even with his friends. He's more able to communicate online using AOL Messenger or commenting on MySpace. If anything, this film is about online culture in the early days of social media and how some kids who were perhaps more comfortable in front of a computer were able to share parts of themselves digitally.
Joan Chen (Twin Peaks and The Last Emperor) co-stars as Mrs. Wang, the mother to Chris. She's married, but her husband is away working in some remote place and sending money to his family. Mrs. Wang is a home-maker, taking care of her two children, Chris and her daughter, as well as her mother-in-law. It becomes obvious that she's frustrated because she'd rather focus on her art. She's a painter that never got to pursue her passion. She's very much like Rachel McAdams' character in Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (2023). It's clear that she loves her kids and her family, but she certainly feels the tensions between her kids' sibling rivalry and her mother-in-law's constant nagging.
Speaking of sibling rivalry, a lot of that rivalry stems from Chris stealing stuff, specifically clothing, from his older sister, Vivian, played by Shirley Chen. It's an indication that Chris is in many ways searching for his identity, searching for who he wants to be. He attempts to glom onto others or mimic them, trying to copy or please their personas to some degree or another. Some of those others include a group of skateboarders.
The film references Superbad (2007) in a diegetic way. That comedy starred Jonah Hill who would later himself direct a film called Mid90s (2018), which is about a 13-year-old who starts hanging out with skateboarders. At first, it made me think that Wang was inspired or doing his version of Mid90s but from an Asian American point-of-view, which like a lot of stories involving minorities, or teens in general, is about assimilation or fitting it. It's no doubt that this film is absolutely excellent in that regard.
Rated R for language, sexual material, drug and alcohol use.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 33 mins.
In theaters.