If I Go Will They Miss Me

If I Go Will They Miss Me begins with a child looking toward the sky, but its real subject is the difficult business of seeing clearly. Twelve-year-old Lil Ant, played with extraordinary sensitivity by Bodhi Jordan Dell, lives in the Nickerson Gardens housing development in Watts, beneath the incessant flight path of Los Angeles International Airport. Every few minutes, another aircraft seems to cross the heavens above him, carrying strangers toward destinations he can only imagine. For Lil Ant, those planes are not merely machines; they represent escape, transformation and the tantalising possibility of becoming something other than what circumstances have prescribed. That longing acquires a painfully intimate dimension when his father, Big Ant, returns from prison. Lil Ant has spent the man’s absence turning him into a legend, comparing his homecoming to the return of Odysseus and drawing him as Poseidon, a muscular god armed with a trident. The reality embodied by J. Alphonse Nicholson, however, is less reassuring: Big Ant is charismatic and physically imposing, but also emotionally stranded, a father who understands that he is being worshipped by his son and is frightened by the knowledge that he does not deserve the pedestal. Writer-director Walter Thompson-Hernández, expanding his Sundance award-winning 2022 short into a 91-minute feature, uses this collision between an imagined father and the fallible man himself to create an unusually tender examination of inheritance, masculinity and the stories children invent when adults leave too much unexplained.

The most compelling contradiction in If I Go Will They Miss Me is that Big Ant wants his son to avoid becoming like him, yet possesses none of the emotional vocabulary required to explain why. Lil Ant’s drawings ought to be evidence of a thriving imagination, but his father regards them almost as warning signs. Big Ant was creative once too, before a reckless act committed under peer pressure — the harassment and violent assault of a janitor — redirected his adolescence into the criminal justice system and began a cycle of incarceration. When he sees his own gifts reflected in the boy, pride is contaminated by panic. He tells Lil Ant to toughen up, abandon his pictures and stop depicting him as a hero, but the apparent harshness is rooted in self-recognition: he fears that similarity itself may be a sentence. One of the film’s most revealing moments finds Big Ant quietly examining the papier-mâché Pegasus wings his son has made for school. His attention betrays genuine admiration before his defensive instincts reassert themselves and tenderness becomes rejection. The scene captures the tragedy of a man who can identify beauty but has been conditioned to mistrust it. J. Alphonse Nicholson does not ask the audience to excuse Big Ant’s infidelity, volatility, neglect or violence; instead, he shows how shame can calcify into aggression when a person cannot bear to be seen by someone who loves him. His performance shifts between swagger and paralysis, making Big Ant seem at once larger than life and developmentally trapped near the age at which his future first collapsed.

Between father and son stands Lozita, played with exhausted grace and formidable precision by Danielle Brooks. She has kept the household functioning through Big Ant’s repeated absences, raised their children, worked, absorbed neighbourhood scrutiny and preserved the hope that his latest return might be different. Her desire to have him home is therefore inseparable from her knowledge that his presence can produce another form of abandonment. Asked about her own happiness, she instinctively redirects the question toward what the children need, a response that reveals how completely personal desire has been postponed in the name of survival. Danielle Brooks is particularly affecting in the pauses before Lozita answers, in the quick recalculations that suggest a woman measuring whether honesty will liberate her or merely create another burden she must manage. The film’s men are repeatedly associated with flight, freedom and disappearance, while Lozita remains on the ground dealing with the consequences of their departures; yet Walter Thompson-Hernández gradually allows her to emerge as far more than the familiar long-suffering partner. She is the family’s centre of gravity, but even gravity can grow tired of holding everyone else in place. If the feature sometimes seems to move away from her just as her inner life becomes most absorbing, Danielle Brooks nevertheless gives it an emotional continuity that its deliberately fragmented storytelling occasionally lacks.

The director’s most audacious decision is to express these tensions through the imaginative language of a child rather than through conventional exposition. Lil Ant’s study of Greek mythology transforms his family into a private pantheon: his wandering father becomes Odysseus, then Poseidon; his betrayed mother appears as Medusa; and the boy imagines himself as Pegasus, the winged creature capable of rising above them both. Around the housing project, spectral boys in white shirts extend their arms like wings and taxi along improvised runways, suspended somewhere between playground performance, collective memory and an apparition of futures that may never arrive. Father and son eventually appear to share this vision, suggesting that imagination is itself an inheritance — perhaps the most valuable quality Big Ant has passed down and the one he is most determined to suppress. The aviation motif also comes from personal memory: Walter Thompson-Hernández grew up beneath the LAX flight path, where the noise of arriving and departing aircraft became part of everyday life and neighbourhood children would imitate the planes with their arms outstretched. That anecdotal foundation prevents the imagery from feeling arbitrarily imposed, even when the film repeats it too insistently. Lil Ant’s decision to steal a toy aeroplane is especially poignant because he is not simply taking an object; he is trying, in the impulsive logic of childhood, to possess the possibility of departure. Flight in this film can mean escape, maturation, incarceration, abandonment or death, but it can also mean the freedom to imagine a destination before knowing how to reach it.

The achievement of Walter Thompson-Hernández lies equally in what he refuses to do. Watts is not photographed as a catalogue of social problems, and the people of Nickerson Gardens are not reduced to evidence in a predetermined argument about deprivation. Residents look directly into the camera in warm, composed portraits; children play, neighbours gossip, fireworks flare behind the buildings and ordinary faces are granted the ceremonial dignity generally reserved for historical paintings. Even Big Ant’s work with horses at the urban stables introduces an unexpected counter-image to the usual cinematic vocabulary of South Los Angeles. The animals become quiet healers, while the stable connects the physical reality of the neighbourhood to Lil Ant’s fascination with Pegasus. A trip to the beach similarly offers father and son a temporary landscape in which their relationship might be reinvented, although the film understands that a change of scenery cannot erase years of absence. Cinematographer Michael Fernandez gives these passages a radiant tactility, balancing sun-warmed skin, deep blue shadows and carefully arranged tableaux without turning economic hardship into decorative texture. The camera searches for the sacred inside the everyday, while the soulful, piano-led music of Malcolm Parson supplies an emotional current beneath scenes that often resist verbal explanation. The use of “This Bitter Earth,” performed by Jon Batiste, provides an especially apt musical frame for a story in which bitterness and beauty are never mutually exclusive.

There are moments when this formal confidence becomes self-conscious. The feature prefers a succession of memories, visions and emotional impressions to a conventional dramatic arc, and some vignettes end just as they appear ready to deepen. The animated sketches can feel less evocative than the handmade drawings themselves, while the overlapping metaphors of aircraft, Greek gods, horses and ghosts occasionally compete for attention instead of enriching one another. The influence of Charles Burnett, Barry Jenkins, Spike Lee and RaMell Ross is visible in the frontal portraits, lyrical interludes, saturated nocturnal colours and sudden departures from realism. At its best, the film absorbs those traditions into a visual grammar suited to Lil Ant’s consciousness; at weaker points, individual flourishes can feel like declarations of cinematic lineage. The narrative is also more predictable than its images. The audience understands Big Ant’s fear and the likely consequences of his behaviour well before the family confronts them, and the screenplay occasionally reiterates an emotional point already expressed more powerfully by a glance or an awkward silence. Yet these reservations are less evidence of an empty style than of an ambitious filmmaker attempting to fit several generations of memory, disappointment and possibility into a deliberately porous structure. Even when the symbolism announces itself too loudly, the feelings underneath it remain specific and persuasive.

What ultimately distinguishes If I Go Will They Miss Me is its refusal to confuse compassion with absolution. Big Ant is neither a monster to be expelled from the story nor a wounded man whose pain automatically excuses the damage he inflicts. Lil Ant, meanwhile, is not presented as a passive victim awaiting rescue. Bodhi Jordan Dell gives the boy curiosity, pride, anger and an alert intelligence that constantly tests the adults’ evasions. His school fights and petty theft suggest the gravitational pull of his father’s history, but the film does not treat repetition as destiny. The crucial inheritance may not be violence at all; it may be artistic perception, the ability to redraw the world when its existing shape becomes intolerable. This is why the title’s question resonates in several directions. It may belong to a father wondering whether absence has erased him, a mother contemplating a life beyond endless repair, a boy dreaming of leaving the neighbourhood, or the ghostly young men who seem to hover at the edge of communal memory. The film’s answer is movingly collective: even when a parent fails, a community can witness a child, hold him and remind him that he is more than the mistakes attached to his name.

Lyrical, imperfect and emotionally resonant, If I Go Will They Miss Me turns a familiar story of a fractured family into a richer meditation on the gap between how children imagine their parents and how parents imagine themselves. Its most memorable images — boys becoming aeroplanes, a handmade Pegasus waiting to take flight, a father among horses, Lozita’s face registering yet another disappointment before she speaks — linger because they do not merely illustrate the drama; they contain the feelings the characters cannot articulate. Walter Thompson-Hernández occasionally reaches for one symbol too many, and the film’s elliptical construction will test viewers expecting tighter narrative momentum, but his affection for these people and this place is never in doubt. He has made a coming-of-age film in which growing up does not require surrendering fantasy, only learning to distinguish the liberating myths from the destructive ones. The result is a compassionate portrait of Black childhood, damaged masculinity and maternal endurance that finds room for wonder without denying the weight of reality.

If I Go Will They Miss Me
Written and directed by Walter Thompson-Hernández
Produced by Josh Peters, Saba Zerehi, Ben Stillman
Starring  J. Alphonse Nicholson, Danielle Brooks, Bodhi Dell, Myles Bullock, Bre-Z
Cinematography: Michael Fernandez
Edited by Walter Thompson-Hernández, Daysha Broadway
Music by Malcolm Parson
Production companies: Spark Features, Further Adventures, Cedar Road, Merino Films, LinLay Productions
Distributed by Rich Spirit (United States)
Release dates: NC
Running time: 92 minutes

Seen on 7 September 2026 at the Deauville International Center