'Doors' captures family tensions

The sly paradoxes of Georgia Lee's "Red Doors" are captured, late in the film, in the image of a Chinese - American teenager performing a traditional ribbon dance in her suburban backyard. Her punky fire-engine-red hair matches the scarlet of her ancestral dress, beneath the hem of which can be glimpsed a battered pair of Pumas.

Cultures crash into each other with barely a sound in Lee's charming, awkward debut feature, and family members sit for polite Sunday dinners while keeping their nervous breakdowns to themselves. The film wonders how it's possible to communicate with your parents and siblings when you can't even talk to yourself.

The Wongs are as assimilated and dysfunctional a bunch of strivers as you'll meet. Patriarch Ed (Tzi Ma of "The Ladykillers" and "The Quiet American") has just retired and is plunging into an invisible but full-on existential crisis. Workaholic eldest daughter Sam (Jacqueline Kim ) is engaged to metrosexual Mark (Jayce Bartok ) and wondering why she's weeping at odd times. Middle daughter Julie (Elaine Kao ), a shy medical student, goes on drab arranged dates but lights up when a sultry movie actress (Mia Riverton ) arrives at her hospital to research a role.

Then there's youngest daughter Katie (Kathy Shao-Lin Lee ), a high school anarchist engaged in an escalating war of pranks and romance with Simon, the boy next door (Sebastian Stan ). "This has got to stop," warns big sister Sam after Katie bombs Simon's locker, to which she breezily replies "He loves me." Which really means she loves him. According to Lee, no one says what they mean in either suburbia or in Chinese-American families.

If that's a little fuzzy, so is the movie, which is well-intentioned, often sweetly comical, but unsure of how hard it wants to bear down. A running gag about the father's regular suicide attempts is rather darker than "Red Doors" is equipped to handle; the character of the mother (Freda Foh Shen ) is so underwritten as to knock the film off its axis. The non-Asian characters, even Riverton's relatively complicated movie star, are on hand to symbolize what the main characters want, or want to leave behind, rather than existing as people in their own right.

Yet the movie also has a sure feeling for the cross currents of family tensions. (The mom's one sharp line of dialogue: "Your dad's always picking on the dog when he's really picking on me.") Lee has made a number of well-regarded short films and apprenticed with Martin Scorsese; there's a confident feature filmmaker in her that still seems hesitant to come out. Not surprisingly, the three Wong sisters and their father could exist in separate movies -- their (short) stories are interesting but not convincingly knit together. Think of "Red Doors" as a promise, and hope that Georgia Lee keeps it.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.