Wonder Boy

If you’re a fan of 1990s Cantopop, it’s likely that you’ve heard of Dick Lee. The charismatic singer-songwriter has written songs for pop stars like Leslie Cheung, Sandy Lam, Jacky Cheung, Sally Yeh and Kit Chan. He’s also a two-time Hong Kong Film Award winner for Best Original Song – for He’s a Woman, She’s a Man and City of Glass. Furthermore, Lee is a pop icon in his home country of Singapore who has written musicals, established his own fashion label and served as the creative director of several Singapore National Day Parades. 

Last year, Lee added another title to his long list of talents, making his directorial debut with Wonder Boy. Co-directed with Daniel Yam, Wonder Boy is a mostly fictional account of Lee’s formative years, covering the short period between his troubled teen years as an aspiring musician in school to his breakthrough as a pop star in 1974 at the age of 18. 

Wonder Boy is a fairly by-the-numbers musical biopic, tracing the rise of Lee as a musician in a school band, his fall to temptations and his eventual return to music. All the clichés are here: the conservative parents, the successful school talent show, the falling out of Lee’s band and his stint with drug use (somewhat glossed over here possibly due to censorship). Even though much of the film is a fictionalised version of his own story, Lee approaches his youth with surprising honesty, not afraid to portray his younger self as a flawed character who was naïve, selfish and sometimes overly arrogant of his musical talent. It also helped that Lee is played by Benjamin Kheng, a member of local band The Sam Willows and a musician who can actually perform Lee’s early hits on screen. 

After the local music scene blossomed in the 1960s, Singapore’s conservative government’s enactment of compulsory military service in 1970 effectively killed the local music industry. It also banned rock music and long hair around that time because it believed that they encouraged drug use, and it blocked music with imperfect English from its airwaves too. When seen with that history in mind, Wonder Boy also provides an interesting snapshot of Singapore’s music scene at the time, showing how young musicians relied on school talent shows to keep their dreams alive. The film is first and foremost about Lee’s story, but it also makes for an interesting unofficial companion piece to local documentary The Songs We Sang, about the rise of Singaporean Mandarin pop music in the 1980s as a response to the government’s promotion of English use a decade earlier.   

Wonder Boy also shines a spotlight on Singaporean pop music as a whole. The country is the home to major stars of the Taiwan and Hong Kong music industries, but its own pop music – both English and Mandarin – has rarely travelled beyond its shores. Featuring some of Lee’s early hits, including Life Story and the addictively catchy Fried Rice Paradise, Wonder Boy is a fantastic showcase of the musical talents of a country that has been largely overlooked in the Asian pop world. The film may be far from revolutionary in its genre, but the music alone makes it worthy of attention. 

Daniel Yam

A graduate of Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Daniel Yam has been working in the media industry for over a decade as a director of short films, commercials and television series. He made his feature film debut as a director on the omnibus film 4Love (2016).