In spite of the scarcity of its budget, Better Luck Tomorrow is certainly impressive. For what Lin’s film lacks in money it makes up in creativity and energy, and magazines from Premiere to Newsweek to Rolling Stone have commented on this.

Roger Ebert called it “extraordinarily accomplished and thought-provoking,” and defended the film’s representation of Asian-Americans when it came under fire at Sundance for portraying Asians in a less than wholly positive light.

Even so, only two black-and-white outcomes—snowballing into success or simply vanishing into celluloid archives—await most small independent films. The recent film My Big Fat Greek Wedding basked in the light of the former, but all too often, low-budget movies fall victim to obscurity.

As a result, a lot hinges on the success of Better Luck Tomorrow. After the movie is “platform” released today—it opens in Boston on April 18—it will test-run in a limited number of theaters to gauge the amount of audience response before distributors decide to pull it from theaters or to expand its run. Studios, after all, are only concerned with how much a film makes, and Lin isn’t afraid to acknowledge this reality.

“If it doesn’t do well in two weeks, this entire three-year journey is over,” Lin says matter-of-factly. “We don’t have billboards or talk shows, but we do have the power of word-of-mouth, and it really depends on the viewer.”

The cast and crew of Better Luck Tomorrow have been canvassing colleges in Chicago as well as on both coasts, spreading news about the film with the assistance of intercollegiate organizations.

As for other Asian-American filmmakers, “they’re holding on, to see how this film does,” Lin says.

“There’s a lot riding on it, but I’m glad, because we’ve never even gotten to this stage before.”

A Question of Identity

In Better Luck Tomorrow, the suburban ennui is different from the ennui of the slick, impersonal American Beauty, but neither is it Not Another Teen Movie. Ben, Virgil, Daric and Han escape from privileged pre-college boredom through drugs, crime and violence.

“These kids are so smart that they build façades, which leads to more repression, and I wanted to explore that,” Lin says. “That was the most important thing to me, the number one goal.”

Part of the reason for the controversy at Sundance stemmed from Lin’s truthful, realistic depiction of Asian-American teenagers, a group often branded the “model minority.”

“I don’t want to fall into the model minority myth,” Lin says, “I didn’t want to make a film about teen violence where the kids were all ‘good.’ You see plenty of these kids on TV, and they’re always there for an Asian reason.”

Unlike those in The Joy Luck Club, the characters in Better Luck Tomorrow do not dwell on the fact that they are Asian-Americans. They’re just teenagers living the American life, navigating the painfully comic and sometimes tragic terrain of adolescence.

Yet even Lin says that he had trouble “looking outside the box” and crafting realistic characters.