Sean Wang’s tender coming-of-age story

With his 2008 set I haveSean Wang captures the intermingling of adolescent friendship and early social media through the lens of the Asian American diaspora and with welcome accuracy. The importance of a MySpace Top 8 and profile song in the world of Chris (Izaac Wang), a 13-year-old Taiwanese American boy, cannot be overstated. Nor can the importance of AOL Instant Messenger in maintaining and expanding his circle of friends or his YouTube channel in giving him an outlet to express his sense of humor be overstated.

When it comes to the differences and contradictions between Chris’ online and real-life interactions, emotions and behavior, I have feels absolutely real. Chris is a typical insecure teenager, but to such an extreme that he self-sabotages himself almost supernaturally. And Wang admirably doesn’t shy away from depicting Chris at his most embarrassing or heinous moments, and the myriad ways his behavior alienates him from family and friends, both old and new.

A central storyline involving Chris’s crush on classmate Madi (Mahaela Park) is particularly adept at showing how a teenager’s shyness can be weaponized, while another subplot about his budding friendship with three older skaters reveals layers of truth about the dangers of trying to impress older kids with a false image of yourself. A scene in which Chris embarrasses his best friend Fahad (Raul Dial) in front of his date (Alysha Syed) and her girlfriend (Alaysia Simmons) by telling a wildly inappropriate story about their activities with a dead squirrel accurately conveys the excruciatingly painful consequences of two young friends with vastly different skills at striking up conversations with girls.

But while many of these snapshots of the precariousness of early teenage years often ring true, I have is too much to ask when Chris’ complicated and dysfunctional personal life also takes center stage. As Chris’ mother Chungsing, Joan Chen brings a quiet but palpable energy to her scenes, fluently conveying the woman’s tenderness toward Chris and his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen), as well as her suppressed regret that her life hasn’t turned out quite as she wanted it to. But it’s all the more disappointing that the character, like Vivian and Chungsing’s mother Nai Nai (Zhang Li Hua), is ultimately sketched so superficially.

A lot of I haveThe narrative is based on Wang’s childhood experiences, and one feels like he’s straying too far in an attempt to be as faithful to those experiences as possible. Although individual moments are bursting with the authenticity of vivid inner lives, the film is cluttered and sometimes lacks the connective tissue between scenes. Certain storylines, such as Chris’s experiences filming the older skater kids, end abruptly and are never picked up again, while Chris’s relationships with Vivian and Fahad suddenly break down or are fully repaired without any context to explain these about-faces.

But despite these shortcomings, I have remains a worthy entry in the pantheon of coming-of-age films. That’s because it so unflinchingly addresses the unique anxieties and frustrations of early teens in that particular time and place, which is as gratifying as its willingness to sidestep the redemptive arc you’d expect from the genre’s tried-and-tested script.