When the protagonist of If I Had Legs I'd Kick You hears herself described as "stretchable, like putty”, her whole body stiffens in protest.
Driven to near insanity by the demands of her mental health counseling job and her young daughter's mysterious illness, Linda is all raw nerves and quick recoil – a mother on the edge of a nervous breakdown. And who can blame her? Barely a few minutes into the movie, the ceiling of her small flat collapses in a flood of water and plaster, and that's just the start of her travails.
In her first feature since Yeast (2007), writer-director Mary Bronstein frames her lead actress, Rose Byrne, in extreme close-up, and it's a bold but sometimes exhausting tack. Previously at her best as the frazzled aerobics entrepreneur in Apple TV’s Physical (2021-23), Byrne has the face of a beleaguered saint and the reflexes of a jungle cat in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
The little daughter, meanwhile, remains mostly unseen, almost an abstraction, but she's a constant, wheedling, needy, needful presence, a voice calling for "Mommy, Mommy, Mommy" when she's not prattling on about wanting a hamster. Linda unwisely gives in to that request, which results a bizarre car crash.
The girl suffers from an unspecified pediatric eating disorder – she seems fearful of eating, of swallowing – and draws sustenance from a stomach feeding tube. Whatever's ailing her is unclear, but medical treatment isn’t helping. A doctor, played by Bronstein herself, speaks ominously of "reassessing her level of care" if the child's weight doesn't crack fifty pounds.
When Linda and her daughter seek refuge in a seedy motel, they're very much on their own. Linda's seaman husband (Christian Slater) checks in by telephone, offering useless advice, while Linda's fellow psychotherapist (Conan O'Brien) shrinks from her increasingly frantic pleas for help.
Yet If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is at times darkly funny. After Linda strikes up a flirtatious friendship with the guy (rapper A$AP Rocky) in the motel room next door, their first almost-date is a midnight trip back to Linda's wrecked apartment. And when the child's doctors order the heroine to show up at a "family group therapy" session, all the attendees are mothers – there’s not a man in sight.
By then, the movie has crept toward Lynchian body horror, and Linda's in full freakout mode. She's hearing voices and hallucinating that the hole in the ceiling – and maybe the child's feeding tube – are sending her messages.
Byrne's performance, rightfully Oscar- and BAFTA-nominated and a Golden Globe-winner, is a tour de force of defiance and self-blame. Linda's doing it all, on zero sleep, yet she can never do enough, not while the problem of her child's ceaseless hunger remains unsolved. For her, and the movie, motherhood is a public trial that never ends.
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