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In Eddie Huang’s coming-of-age directorial debut, Boogie, high school student and aspiring college basketball player Alfred “Boogie” Chen takes a moment to share his thoughts about the required reading material, The Catcher in the Rye.
“Holden’s unrelatable,” he weighs in.*
Not a groundbreaking sentiment, but perhaps in an effort to keep Boogie in active discussion, the teacher responds, “Most people your age seems to find Holden a hero.”
Underneath this line is a developmental landmine, in which the movie will have to maneuver a demonstration on why Boogie, an average teenager from New York, is not like most people his age. As he recites the expected counter about Holden’s privilege to freely complain while the world spins in its celestial ways, it’s certain that Boogie’s story will parallel to Holden’s in more ways that he (or maybe even Huang) wishes to. As far removed Boogie may feel about the ducks in the pond, having the main character give any assessment of The Catcher in the Rye is the curse of angsty bildungsroman comparison.
Huang sculpts Boogie from the same stone of sports drama with the recycled “No, Dad, I’m living your dream” inscription from years before, but in being able to use the framework of a working-class Chinese-American family, his take is remarkably refreshing. For most of his life, Boogie (Taylor Takahashi) feels like he’s been fighting against the currents. An unplanned child of an unlikely couple, Boogie putting all of his chips into scoring a full-ride athletic scholarship has more significance than just having the opportunity to attend college. Even as such, his father instills the strange, but all-too-common, idea that in order to impress college scouts, Boogie needs to find his way into playing against rival ball player Monk (played by the late rapper Pop Smoke). His mother, distraught with accumulating bills and no nearing sign of success, tries to drum up a Plan B for the family’s sake, which may involve playing for the Chinese Basketball Association.
The complications of attuning to Chinese-centric views in America while being able to criticize Chinese Americans (“Jeremy Lin stopped being Chinese when he thanked God,” he sneers) makes for a triumphant avoidance in pressing Boogie into a two-dimensional character of color with dreams. It’s the mental and cultural balancing acts that come with being an American-born son of immigrants, where grasping the concepts of home, right and wrong, and duty adds another layer to the inner turmoil. Huang achieves those fluctuations without trying to invest the term “model minority” in expository monologues or in scenarios of overt anti-Asian racism (well, aside from Monk’s trash talking). Boogie sidesteps a lot of sports cliches, like a training montage incited by a bout of external motivation or a seconds-on-the-clock slam dunk. The movie’s trajectory lies in Boogie’s hands, where he can decide what he wants and doesn’t want to do. It feels unholy in scripted maturity, but somehow realistic in the way teenagers can give a shit if they care to.
As unfortunate as it may be, Boogie possesses the same kind of unlikable as Holden does, even if he’s meant to be earnest. His pick-up line to the love interest Eleanor (Taylor Paige, endearing even in her limited role) gives me cringe flashbacks, let alone even thinking about some of his crass actions that come after. I could see why Boogie, as an outlier from the Ken Jeongs or the Daniel Henneys, can afford the bluntness but in the end, his flaws are his own (and truthfully, if they aren’t annoying, are they really teenagers?). Whether we like him or not, it’s the future that Boogie will learn to bargain with. As the saying goes, life is a game that one plays according to the rules.
* The Boogie-isms in this review are paraphrased. It is my character weakness where not only that I am terrible with quoting, but that I still believe that I could remember them days later and refuse to write them down.
Boogie
2021
dir. Eddie Huang
89 mins
Now playing in theaters (but please be safe).
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