‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’ Review: Rose Byrne Gives a Tour de Force Performance in Impressively Sustained but Taxing Motherhood Nightmare

Most people’s idea of a Hamptons homemaker is probably some version of a Nancy Meyers character — rich, accomplished and caught up in dizzying romantic confusion in her own piece of tastefully decorated, sun-kissed real estate porn. Linda, the Montauk psychologist played with edge-of-delirium tension by a phenomenal Rose Byrne, is not that woman. In writer-director Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Linda is basically a knot of unrelieved stress, immune to the “It’s not your fault” platitudes of a family therapist who warns against the “thinking trap” of shame and blame.

The root cause of Linda’s whirling-dervish anxiety spiral is the mysterious, seemingly untreatable illness of her young unnamed daughter (Delaney Quinn), heard but unseen almost throughout, aside from the bag attached to her intravenous feeding tube. Or her little feet dangling from the toilet as water floods the bathroom of the family home. It turns out that deluge extends to much of the upper floor, resulting in a sizeable hole in the downstairs living room ceiling, which starts oozing weird goop and serving as a portal to Lynchian visions of the great void.

Is that the most surreal part of Linda’s meltdown or is it the feral hamster, hell-bent on escaping from its pet store box? Or the squalling baby she finds herself stuck with after he’s abandoned by his fretful mother Caroline (a near-hysterical Danielle McDonald), one of Linda’s patients? Or the revelation of a corporeal opening strangely like the seeping hole in her apartment?

Linda’s husband Charles is a cruise captain away at sea (cameo alert!), so she’s left to care for their sick daughter, listen to her needy patients and deal with a contractor, who makes very little progress with the ceiling repair before abandoning the job due to a family emergency. Or because he can’t deal with Linda’s maximum-strength agitation.

Reached by phone, Charles responds with defensive self-righteousness to Linda’s angry rant about the chaos that’s consuming her life, asking, “Well, how do you think I feel having to be away working all the time?” Which is pretty much what Caroline’s belligerent husband says over the phone while blaming Linda for his wife going missing. Her own therapist (Conan O’Brien, in a droll feature acting debut), who operates out of the same practice, is similarly unsympathetic, showing dwindling reserves of patience.  

I will neither be the first nor the last to describe this as Nightbitch meets Uncut Gems, and the latter allusion is not entirely unrelated. The director’s husband, Ronald Bronstein, who’s among the producers here along with Josh Safdie, has co-written almost all the Safdie brothers’ features. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You recalls early work like Daddy Longlegs and Heaven Knows What in its emotional rawness, aesthetic scrappiness and helter-skelter energy and more widely seen later features like Good Time and Uncut Gems in its adrenalized volatility.

But the morbid humor here is all Bronstein, even in the kid’s favorite lullaby, Harry Nilsson’s “Think About Your Troubles,” the lyrics of which feature a dead whale and an ocean polluted by teardrops.

The clinic where Linda takes her daughter for treatment every day presents more headaches, not least the daily altercation with the parking attendant (Mark Stolzenberg). The head of the program, Dr. Spring (played by the director), warns her that if her child doesn’t begin to show sufficient weight gain to get off the IV, she will no longer be able to continue at the clinic. Which of course feeds Linda’s guilt, already off the charts every time she leaves her daughter alone.

The situation is no more conducive to a calm state of mind at the motel to which Linda and her daughter are relocated by her landlord while repairs are underway. The front desk clerk, Diana (Ivy Wolk), is a surly punk who gives her judgy attitude every time she heads to reception for another bottle of wine. Resident superintendent James (hip-hop artist A$AP Rocky, radiating charisma and kindness) is the opposite.

He’s mellow and friendly and helpful, even scoring Linda a bag of coke through the dark web when sparking up her usual evening blunt no longer quiets her demons. But Linda’s erratic behavior eventually alienates James too.

Through all this, Byrne’s high-wire act remains riveting, scrutinized for long stretches of the film in DP Christopher Messina’s probing closeups. It’s a bruising performance, digging deep into the intense pressure and isolation that can sometimes accompany motherhood with a mercilessness that makes Nightbitch look tame, while not excluding compassion. You feel for Linda as she struggles to keep her head from exploding when blinkered men fail to get just how crazy-making responsibility for a small child can be.

The turmoil of Linda’s psyche is echoed in the woozy disorientation of Filipe Messeder’s soundscape, notably the needling drone of the child’s IV machine. And the movie veers mildly into body horror in the final act, as Linda’s meltdown crescendos, not long after she wonders if she got rid of the wrong baby in an earlier abortion. It’s not often that American movies allow mothers to say such things, but Bronstein — whose only previous feature, Yeast, dates back to 2008 — is bracingly uninhibited.

As transfixing and imaginative as the nerve-jangling experience is, it must be said that absorbing two hours of someone else’s anxiety can get exhausting. (I have more than enough of my own.) If you don’t enjoy strung-out spectacle with a surreal vibe, this might not be the movie for you. Unless you pop a Klonopin on the way in.