‘If I Go Will They Miss Me’ Review: Talent-to-Watch Walter Thompson-Hernández Weaves a Lyrical Portrait of a Boy on the Brink of Flight
Even the most inspirational films about growing up in the inner-city have a tendency to look down on their subjects, portraying them as characters to be rescued or redeemed. But in Walter Thompson-Hernández’s one-of-a-kind Sundance discovery “If I Go Will They Miss Me,” the filmmaker — and his largely untrained (and by extension authentic) ensemble — spend most of their time looking up to the skies, where passing airplanes represent the world beyond Los Angeles’ working-class Watts neighborhood.
That perspective, which rhymes with the low-angle view of boys jumping between the roofs of neighboring apartment buildings in Charles Burnett’s street-level classic “Killer of Sheep,” rejects the concerned but condescending narrative of films in which the forces of crime, drugs, gangs and poverty pull Black boys down. Instead, Thompson-Hernández gives them wings. Aiming to establish a new idiom to represent the community and conditions in which he was raised, the journalist-turned-director (whose instinct is to point the camera at people commonly overlooked) channels elements of surrealism, modern dance and Greek mythology that have never been combined in quite this way before.
Thompson-Hernández grew up directly below the LAX flight path, gazing up at passing jets without realizing quite how harmful they were to his community (in addition to the toxins they release, there have been unconscionable cases of fuel dumps over populated neighborhoods near the airport). To him, they symbolized something else, as he and his peers imagined themselves as planes, running with arms outstretched, as if preparing to fly. In his movie, young African American men do the same, assuming the inverted-V pose rendered iconic in “Weapons,” with altogether different connotations.
At a certain age, a kind of metamorphosis takes place, and these boys “take off” to whatever unspecified next phase awaits. Hence the question asked by the title, “If I Go Will They Miss Me,” which Thompson-Hernández applies to both his 2022 Sundance jury award-winning short film and its more refined (if still slightly unfocused) feature-length expansion. Here, the filmmaker recasts his main character, 12-year-old Anthony Harris, Jr. (who played himself in the short), named after his father. The film refers to these two as “Lil Ant” (Bodhi Jordan Dell) and “Big Ant” (J. Alphonse Nicholson), respectively, exploring the complicated dynamic between them — with family matriarch Lozita (Danielle Brooks) serving as the radiant heart and unsung lynchpin in their relationship.
Lil Ant has a vivid imagination, which manifests itself in school, where doodling in class — he draws a winged Pegasus, who comes to life on the page — doesn’t prevent him from paying attention. He’s a model student with a well-formed answer when the teacher asks about ancient Greek gods. Among the many ideas the film explores, front and center is the notion that communities like Ant’s create their own mythologies.
Lil Ant lionizes his father, who’s far from perfect (in fact, as the film opens, he’s just returning from his latest stint in prison), and yet, the long-absent figure remains heroic in his son’s eyes. Lil Ant likens his dad’s absence to time spent at the Trojan War, “kind of like Odysseus, who eventually returned back to Ithaca after being away from him family for a long time,” the boy explains via voiceover. He hopes his dad won’t have to go back (to jail). Looking through his son’s notebooks, Big Ant recognizes himself, flashing back to a costly teenage mistake.
If Lil Ant identifies as Pegasus, that would make his father Poseidon, appearing with toga and trident in his son’s imagination — visions that may remind audiences of the ecstatic, revisionist folklore dimension of Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” Thompson-Hernández clearly has such films in mind (as well as RaMell Ross’ “Hale County This Morning, This Evening”), though his most important visual references are to paintings by the likes of Jacob Lawrence, Winfred Rembert and (especially) Noah Davis.
Some audiences may find it difficult to adjust to the filmmaker’s mesmerizing, somewhat avant garde cinematic style — more lyrical than logical — in which composition (how Black bodies are posed within the frame) takes precedence over what the characters are saying at any given moment. But he’s right to realize that those choices are more likely to stick with us, from Black skin lit blue (à la “Moonlight”) to a papier-mâché Pegasus imprint themselves on our memory. For instance, Big Ant keeps a horse at Richland Farms (the subject of Thompson-Hernández’s 2020 book “The Compton Cowboys”), and the film observes him spending long hours there. He also takes his son to the beach, which offers an escapist backdrop for a bonding experience.
Malcolm Parson’s soulful piano score connects these disparate elements, while the entire project is bookended by Jon Batiste’s “This Bitter Earth.” Although “If I Go” can occasionally feel amorphous and meandering at times, it’s comprised of a hundred indelible images which collectively make a powerful impression, especially footage of the community at large. Thompson-Hernández and his DP, Michael Fernandez, shot in and around the Nickerson Gardens public housing development, embracing the faces they found there. The film brims with resonant inserts of Lil Ant’s neighbors, leaning against project walls, backlit by fireworks, sitting in basketball hoops, high above the ground.
Repeatedly, the project seems to transcend the projects, defying gravity in its poetic depiction of how this resilient, supportive community comes together around Lil Ant, stepping in where his father stumbles to embrace the boy. In that sense, the film answers its own question.
That perspective, which rhymes with the low-angle view of boys jumping between the roofs of neighboring apartment buildings in Charles Burnett’s street-level classic “Killer of Sheep,” rejects the concerned but condescending narrative of films in which the forces of crime, drugs, gangs and poverty pull Black boys down. Instead, Thompson-Hernández gives them wings. Aiming to establish a new idiom to represent the community and conditions in which he was raised, the journalist-turned-director (whose instinct is to point the camera at people commonly overlooked) channels elements of surrealism, modern dance and Greek mythology that have never been combined in quite this way before.
Thompson-Hernández grew up directly below the LAX flight path, gazing up at passing jets without realizing quite how harmful they were to his community (in addition to the toxins they release, there have been unconscionable cases of fuel dumps over populated neighborhoods near the airport). To him, they symbolized something else, as he and his peers imagined themselves as planes, running with arms outstretched, as if preparing to fly. In his movie, young African American men do the same, assuming the inverted-V pose rendered iconic in “Weapons,” with altogether different connotations.
At a certain age, a kind of metamorphosis takes place, and these boys “take off” to whatever unspecified next phase awaits. Hence the question asked by the title, “If I Go Will They Miss Me,” which Thompson-Hernández applies to both his 2022 Sundance jury award-winning short film and its more refined (if still slightly unfocused) feature-length expansion. Here, the filmmaker recasts his main character, 12-year-old Anthony Harris, Jr. (who played himself in the short), named after his father. The film refers to these two as “Lil Ant” (Bodhi Jordan Dell) and “Big Ant” (J. Alphonse Nicholson), respectively, exploring the complicated dynamic between them — with family matriarch Lozita (Danielle Brooks) serving as the radiant heart and unsung lynchpin in their relationship.
Lil Ant has a vivid imagination, which manifests itself in school, where doodling in class — he draws a winged Pegasus, who comes to life on the page — doesn’t prevent him from paying attention. He’s a model student with a well-formed answer when the teacher asks about ancient Greek gods. Among the many ideas the film explores, front and center is the notion that communities like Ant’s create their own mythologies.
Lil Ant lionizes his father, who’s far from perfect (in fact, as the film opens, he’s just returning from his latest stint in prison), and yet, the long-absent figure remains heroic in his son’s eyes. Lil Ant likens his dad’s absence to time spent at the Trojan War, “kind of like Odysseus, who eventually returned back to Ithaca after being away from him family for a long time,” the boy explains via voiceover. He hopes his dad won’t have to go back (to jail). Looking through his son’s notebooks, Big Ant recognizes himself, flashing back to a costly teenage mistake.
If Lil Ant identifies as Pegasus, that would make his father Poseidon, appearing with toga and trident in his son’s imagination — visions that may remind audiences of the ecstatic, revisionist folklore dimension of Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” Thompson-Hernández clearly has such films in mind (as well as RaMell Ross’ “Hale County This Morning, This Evening”), though his most important visual references are to paintings by the likes of Jacob Lawrence, Winfred Rembert and (especially) Noah Davis.
Some audiences may find it difficult to adjust to the filmmaker’s mesmerizing, somewhat avant garde cinematic style — more lyrical than logical — in which composition (how Black bodies are posed within the frame) takes precedence over what the characters are saying at any given moment. But he’s right to realize that those choices are more likely to stick with us, from Black skin lit blue (à la “Moonlight”) to a papier-mâché Pegasus imprint themselves on our memory. For instance, Big Ant keeps a horse at Richland Farms (the subject of Thompson-Hernández’s 2020 book “The Compton Cowboys”), and the film observes him spending long hours there. He also takes his son to the beach, which offers an escapist backdrop for a bonding experience.
Malcolm Parson’s soulful piano score connects these disparate elements, while the entire project is bookended by Jon Batiste’s “This Bitter Earth.” Although “If I Go” can occasionally feel amorphous and meandering at times, it’s comprised of a hundred indelible images which collectively make a powerful impression, especially footage of the community at large. Thompson-Hernández and his DP, Michael Fernandez, shot in and around the Nickerson Gardens public housing development, embracing the faces they found there. The film brims with resonant inserts of Lil Ant’s neighbors, leaning against project walls, backlit by fireworks, sitting in basketball hoops, high above the ground.
Repeatedly, the project seems to transcend the projects, defying gravity in its poetic depiction of how this resilient, supportive community comes together around Lil Ant, stepping in where his father stumbles to embrace the boy. In that sense, the film answers its own question.