A boy watches airplanes cross the sky as he tries to understand the people closest to him. Their destinations remain a mystery, just like the questions he has about his own family. In If I Go Will They Miss Me, writer-director Walter Thompson-Hernández builds a coming-of-age story around that uncertainty. As Lil Ant navigates family turmoil through Greek mythology, the film asks what happens when a Black boy’s imagination can take him places his circumstances cannot.
What If a Black Boy Could See His World as a Myth?
Twelve-year-old Lil Ant struggles to connect with his father, Big Ant, who returns home after serving time in prison. With gaps in their relationship that he cannot easily explain, Lil Ant turns to an imaginative world that gives shape to experiences he is still too young to understand fully.
For Black boys, childhood can come with expectations they never asked for. They may be expected to toughen up before they have the words to explain their hurt, to show strength when they need reassurance, and to make sense of adult decisions that change their lives. An absent father can leave a child wrestling with questions he doesn’t yet know how to ask. Does he miss me? Did I do something wrong? What would it take for him to stay? Lil Ant’s story makes space for those questions without suggesting that every boy’s experience looks the same.
In his mythic world, Lil Ant can give shape to what he cannot control in real life. Adults make decisions that reshape his family, but his imagination lets him approach those experiences on his own terms. Mythology becomes more than an escape; it gives him room to interpret a world whose rules he did not choose.
There is something heartbreaking about a child having to build a mythology around the people who disappoint him. Lil Ant’s fantasy reveals the emotional work children sometimes do when they have little control over their circumstances. He must make sense of adult choices without having the information or power to change them. Beneath the grandeur of his imagined world, a child tries to understand what he can count on.
Black boys deserve stories where their inner lives are as vivid as their struggles, where vulnerability can coexist with wonder, and where their imaginations can take them somewhere extraordinary. Lil Ant is more than a symbol of fatherlessness or a lesson in resilience. His story lets a Black boy be curious, hurt, hopeful, and heroic all at once. Thompson-Hernández gives those feelings a mythic landscape without reducing Lil Ant’s life to the hardship that surrounds him.
Danielle Brooks and J. Alphonse Nicholson Give the Family Room to Breathe
Danielle Brooks plays Lozita, Lil Ant’s mother, while J. Alphonse Nicholson portrays Big Ant. Bodhi Dell stars as Lil Ant in his first leading role. Myles Bullock and Bre-Z also appear in the film.
The performances keep the family’s emotional tensions at the center of the story. Nicholson’s Big Ant must confront the difference between returning home and repairing the damage his absence caused. Brooks brings Lozita’s perspective into the conflict, while Dell keeps the story grounded in Lil Ant’s experience of trying to understand adults whose choices he cannot control.
A Father Can Come Home Without Knowing How to Stay
If I Go Will They Miss Me recognizes that a parent’s return cannot erase the hurt their absence caused. Big Ant has another chance to reconnect with his family, but rebuilding that relationship requires more than coming home. It requires facing what his absence has cost them.
By placing this family struggle inside a world of gods, ghosts, and impossible possibilities, Thompson-Hernández challenges the idea that stories about marginalized children must stay grounded in hardship to feel authentic. Black and brown children deserve stories that let them imagine beyond their circumstances without pretending those circumstances don’t exist.
Black boys shouldn’t have to endure extraordinary hardship to earn extraordinary stories. Lil Ant’s world makes room for his pain, but it also gives his curiosity and imagination space to lead. He deserves to be the hero of that world simply because he is a child with a life larger than what has hurt him.
What other movies use fantasy, sci-fi, or mythology to tell powerful stories about marginalized communities we don’t always see in these genres?
