‘If I Go Will They Miss Me’ Review: Danielle Brooks in Sundance Drama

There is no shortage of opportunities for children, particularly Black and brown ones, to be disabused of their fantasies. Parents can disappoint. Friends can die. An adolescent mistake can derail a future before it begins. Cherished hopes can simply not work out, for no obvious reason at all.

If I Go Will They Miss Me, a remarkable coming-of-age drama premiering at Sundance, does not shy away from such heartbreaks. Rather than turn them into a harsh awakening, however, writer-director Walter Thompson-Hernández makes a refreshing point of holding fast to big dreams and bits of poetry anyway — not to deny the realities of life, but to embrace it in all its bittersweet richness.  

At the film’s heart is an intertwined pair of journeys set in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, under the shadows of planes coming and going from LAX. Twelve-year-old Anthony, or Lil Ant (Bodhi Jordan Dell) as he’s called, is a consummate dreamer, constantly doodling or staring up at the clouds. Lately, he’s been taken with his school’s unit on Greek mythology, imagining his own father as mighty Poseidon taking to the skies with trusty Pegasus.

This comparison sits uncomfortably with the man himself. Though Big Ant (J. Alphonse Nicholson) was not unlike Lil Ant in his own youth, he’s changed since a teenage incident that landed him in prison for the first of several stays. Now fresh home from his latest sentence (or “back from the Trojan War, kind of like Odysseus,” in Lil Ant’s fanciful framing), he’s struggling to fall back into the rhythms of the family he’s been separated from for so long — and particularly with the son whose adoring gaze sees him in ways he can’t see himself.

Neither arc sounds like anything unique on its face, and this is not the sort of film to traffic in shocking twists or dramatic revelations. But Thompson-Hernández realizes them with an admirable level of care and creativity, as well as a palpable affection for his characters and the community they live in. Not all of his ambitions pay off equally — the various motifs, built around horses, aviation and classical mythology, don’t always blend seamlessly, and after two viewings I’m still not totally sure what to make of a not-quite-subplot about a disaster involving a 747 and an elementary school. Still, it’s a pleasure just to get to absorb the movie’s gorgeous images and marvelous performances, held together by a dreamy logic whose flow is easier to feel than to explain.

While Thompson-Hernández’s visual language borrows from influences like Spike Lee and Barry Jenkins, he finds striking shots all his own. If I Go Will They Miss Me is laced through with touches of the surreal, inviting us to look past literal truths and into spiritual ones: doodles in Lil Ant’s notebook that grow animated and fly about the page; fantasies of Big Ant and his best friend (Myles Bullock’s JJ) in Grecian togas, like the gods Lil Ant sees them as; recurring visions of neighborhood boys in white t-shirts with their arms stretched out like wings.

But there are compositions as well that took my breath away precisely because they are so deceptively ordinary, like a blue basketball court stretching wide like an urban ocean, or a man crouched in front of a waiting plane as if he too might be about to take off. So expressive are these images that you could almost imagine getting sucked into them with no sound at all — except that then, you’d be missing out on a lovely soundtrack bookended by Jon Batiste’s resonant cover of “This Bitter Earth” and stitched together by Malcolm Parson’s wistful, jazzy piano score.

If I Go Will They Miss Me roots its story in the messiness of everyday existence. Big Ant’s love for his family is not in doubt, but it doesn’t stop him from being an unreliable husband, or from projecting his own fears and insecurities onto his relationship with his child. His wife Lozita (Danielle Brooks, so wonderfully warm and weary I wish she’d had a bit more to do) is capable and supportive, but slowly crumbling under the stress of keeping this household together and afloat. Lil Ant changes from day to day in the manner of adolescents everywhere, absorbing differing ideas about what manhood should look like and trying each one on for size.

Rather than give in to either misery porn or glossy sentimentality, however, If I Go Will They Miss Me finds intense emotionality in a disarming sense of tenderness. It notices the way father and son both fiddle with their necklaces (matching A’s, for Ant) during a prickly conversation, the unconscious gesture linking them together as their words pull them apart. It gives Big Ant the space to succumb to sudden, boyish delight at the sight of a purple papier-mâché Pegasus, constructed by Lil Ant for a school project. Nicholson’s performance is spectacular throughout, but here it’s moving to the point of tears. Years of hardness melt off Big Ant’s face as he gives himself over to sheer joy.

It doesn’t last. Inevitably, Big Ant soon comes crashing back down to Earth and the swirl of anger and sorrow that await him there; inevitably, Lil Ant and Lozita are forced to face his unhappiness, and figure out how to react. Even the hopeful ending is no happily ever after, refusing as it does to tie up any unresolved issues or feelings too neatly. But in the film’s understanding that that moment mattered — that such flights of whimsy are not frivolous detours from life but essential elements of it, worth protecting in a world so eager to rob you of them — If I Go Will They Miss Me extends to him, his family and all of us watching, a rare and precious bit of grace.