89 min | R | March 5, 2021 | Focus Features
Alfred Chin can ball, but his parents, his rival, and his first girlfriend all want a piece of him. Eddie Huang crams a coming-of-age story, a romance, and an immigrant family drama into one undersized debut. The voice is real. The movie around it is not finished.
Alfred Chin goes by Boogie. He is a Chinese American teenager in Queens with a jump shot and a chip on his shoulder. He wants to play college basketball and then reach the NBA. His parents want different things from him and from each other. Eddie Huang’s film frames the sport as the arena where a kid negotiates his identity, his family, and his future. The story tries to be a basketball movie, a romance, and an immigrant family drama at the same time.
Taylor Takahashi plays Boogie in his first screen role. He carries a guarded stillness that reads as depth in some scenes and as blankness in others. Taylour Paige plays Eleanor with more ease than the script earns and finds warmth in a relationship the writing barely builds. Pop Smoke plays Monk, Boogie’s on-court rival, in his only film appearance, and he commands the frame with a physical confidence the other actors chase. Perry Yung and Pamelyn Chee play Boogie’s parents as a marriage curdled by disappointment. Their fights give the film its sharpest edges.
Eddie Huang writes and directs his first feature. He fills the dialogue with specificity about Asian American life that the structure cannot support. The basketball scenes lack the kinetic clarity the climax demands, and the editing cuts around the action instead of building it. The soundtrack leans on Pop Smoke and Brooklyn drill to set the mood, and the music does more emotional work than the script. Huang stages the family scenes in cramped apartments and restaurant kitchens that ground the film in a real place. The craft shows ambition and inexperience in the same frame.
Boogie wants to say something honest about a young man pulled between his parents’ sacrifices and his own hunger. The pieces are there. The film never decides which story it is telling. It rushes its romance, shortchanges its sport, and resolves its conflicts before they earn their weight. Huang has a voice and a perspective the screen needs. He has not yet figured out how to build a movie around them.