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Cinematographer-turned-director Bruce Thierry Cheung offers an artful and affecting mix of harshly defined specifics and impressionistic storytelling in “Don’t Come Back from the Moon,” a cumulatively poignant drama about absent fathers and abandoned families in an economically devastated desert community. Structured more like a tone poem than a conventional narrative, it’s an elliptical memory play set in some fuzzily defined yesterday — judging from the appliances and automobiles, maybe 20 or so years ago. At the same time, it also evokes a sense of bleak devastation that suggests a futuristic tale of survival in a post-apocalyptic world.

Such stylization seems altogether appropriate for a film that, at heart, really is a story about the aftermath of a disaster.

“Don’t Come Back from the Moon” is based on a novel by Dean Bakopoulos (who collaborated in adapting the screenplay with Cheung) that was set in a declining Rust Belt town...

"It was as if he vaporized out of the driver's seat and just... floated away." Brainstorm Media has debuted an official trailer for an indie drama titled Don't Come Back From The Moon, an adaptation of a novel that first premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival in 2017, where it won a Special Jury Prize for Directing. This was made by cinematographer Bruce Thierry Cheung before he made the junk sci-fi film Future World, but is just now getting released. It's about a group of kids in a small California desert town who are forced into a scavenging life when their fathers abandoned them ("for the Moon") without warning. Starring Jeff Wahlberg, James Franco, Rashida Jones, Alyssa Elle Steinacker, Henry Hopper, Hale Lytle, Jeremiah Noe, and Cheyenne Haynes. This looks like one of those artsy indies filled with random shots of kids hanging out, running around, and doing whatever. The...