THE STORY – According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, more than half of trans boys attempt suicide. Directors Lexie Bean and Logan Rozos explore the vulnerability of their transmasculine community. They delve into their own personal experiences, intertwining them with the stories of two young trans men who died by suicide.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Lexie Bean & Logan Rozos (Directors)
THE RUNNING TIME – 86 Minutes
Some documentaries arrive with answers. “What Will I Become?” arrives with a question that refuses to be resolved. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, more than half of all trans boys will attempt suicide. Rather than building an argument around that statistic, the film treats it as an atmosphere, something already pressing down on every image and conversation. The result is not an exposé or a warning, but a sustained act of attention.
At the center of the documentary are the lives of Blake Brockington and Kyler Prescott, two young trans men whose deaths by suicide continue to reverberate through their communities. Brockington, a homecoming king, was publicly visible in ways often mistaken for protection. Prescott, a poet and musician, lived more quietly, his influence felt most deeply by those closest to him. The film places their stories side by side, dismantling the comforting fiction that recognition, talent, or success can insulate someone from despair. Visibility, the film suggests, is not the same as safety.
Guiding this approach are co-directors Lexie Bean and Logan Rozos, who situate themselves squarely within the world they document. Their presence shapes the tone from the start. This is not a work driven by investigation or outside curiosity, but by proximity. Bean and Rozos aren’t explaining a crisis, they’re living inside it. That choice lends the film an immediacy that feels earned, even when it limits analytical distance.
What distinguishes “What Will I Become?” from many documentaries about suicide is its refusal to chase causality. There are no experts diagnosing the problem, no tidy frameworks promising prevention if followed correctly. Suicide is treated as a rupture rather than a mystery, something that reorganizes families, friendships, and entire communities. Parents speak about recognizing their children too late. Friends describe the strange responsibility of carrying someone forward when their physical presence is gone. Grief, here, is not private. It is structural.
Despite its subject matter, the documentary is far from unrelentingly bleak. Again and again, it returns to moments of warmth, humor, and connection. Much of the film consists of people talking, remembering, and listening. These scenes ground the work in the everyday labor of care, emphasizing that survival is rarely an individual achievement. No one makes it through alone, and pretending otherwise is part of the harm. The film occasionally reaches for visual abstraction through animation and stop-motion sequences meant to express interior states of grief and memory. While these gestures are clearly rooted in tenderness, they don’t always deepen the emotional impact. Some moments feel softened when stillness may have been more powerful. Even so, the impulse behind them aligns with the film’s central ethic: to hold pain without exploiting it.
Politics are never far from view. Discussions of transphobia, toxic masculinity, and legislative hostility toward trans bodies connect personal suffering to systemic abandonment. References to recent U.S. politics make clear that despair doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. At times, the film states this more explicitly than necessary, reiterating ideas already made legible through lived experience. But the insistence on naming the structures at work remains crucial. Mental health, the film argues quietly but firmly, is never separate from material conditions. This perspective is reinforced by the involvement of Harper Steele as executive producer. Known to many as the protagonist of “Will & Harper” and of course as a former Saturday Night Live staff-writer, Steele has increasingly positioned herself as an advocate for trans-centered storytelling that foregrounds humanity over spectacle. Her participation here signals a clear through-line: an investment in narratives that refuse to reduce trans lives to controversy or tragedy, even when confronting loss head-on. This is less about prestige than about continuity, about ensuring that trans stories are told by those closest to them.
What ultimately lingers is the documentary’s insistence on futurity, however fragile. Alongside mourning, it highlights resources, support networks, and communal practices of care. These aren’t presented as solutions, but as ongoing work. The documentary is explicit about what it doesn’t offer: expertise, closure, or guarantees. What it offers instead is presence. The act of staying, of witnessing, becomes its own form of resistance. It’s clear to say that “What Will I Become?” is not definitive, nor does it aspire to be. It’s uneven, deeply sincere, and occasionally unsure of its own shape. But its power lies in its refusal to isolate grief or romanticize survival. This isn’t a film about why people die, but about what it takes to keep living when the world keeps insisting you shouldn’t.
