‘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…