A crazy poor Asian story of sex, drugs and cage dancing in Angie Wang’s MDMA, a film based on her life

In the opening scene of MDMA, Angie Wang’s semi-autobiographical film about her gritty 1980s youth, we find Wang in a cage. Dressed in a tiny, tight and tacky outfit, she’s writhing on a platform for throngs of gaping men below, as a failed college student turned exotic dancer trying to make ends meet and reality disappear. The swigs of tequila and lines of cocaine help – momentarily.

But while the cage in the scene may be real, it is also metaphor for the young Wang’s plight in life. Born into a chaotic Chinese-American family, with an absentee mother and a loving but hard-drinking restaurant-cook father, Wang was left alone most nights, raising herself on takeaways and 1970s television.

By 17, her innate intelligence and excellent test scores have landed her a place at a prestigious university. But once there, she finds her family can’t pay the tuition. So what would a remarkably smart but troubled girl do?

In Wang’s case she gets a science department assistant’s job at her college’s lab and figures out how to make   MDMA, also known as the hip new party drug ecstasy. Soon the first-year student becomes the largest manufacturer of the yet-to-be prohibited substance on the entire US west coast.

Her debut film, starring Annie Q as Wang, is a sometimes harrowing, drug-fuelled journey made lighter and more palatable by some impressive period touches – a soundtrack of hits by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Adam Ant and Kajagoogoo, and throwback wardrobes that would make Madonna and The Official Preppy Handbook crowd scream with recognition.

It’s a journey that is at times funny, sad, cool and dark – a warped Cinderella story that involves a Chinese-American from the ’hood who uses her brains to climb the social and economic ladder of an elite college, and away from a childhood of abuse and neglect.