Just describing the situation in which Linda (Rose Byrne) finds herself in Mary Bronstein’s descent-into-hell motherhood drama If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is enough to provoke the state of heightened anxiety that the movie seeks to create in its audience. While her unhelpful husband (Christian Slater, mainly heard as a voice on the phone) is away on a long work trip, Linda finds herself single-parenting their chronically ill daughter (Delaney Quinn). Exactly what ails this elementary-school-age child is not clear. Indeed, the character is never named and remains an almost wholly offscreen presence, appearing only in oblique glimpses: a grimy hand, a sock-clad pair of feet. But whatever the little girl’s illness may be, it’s serious enough that Linda has to hook her up to a feeding tube every night. When the bedroom ceiling in their Montauk home caves in, flooding the whole house, mother and child decamp to a shabby motel nearby until the damage can be fixed. Meanwhile, the frazzled Linda is holding down a job as a therapist while continuing to unload her rage and misery onto her own therapist (a cannily cast Conan O’Brien), who for his part is losing patience with his client’s lack of respect for boundaries.
From the moment we meet Linda, she’s not just on the verge of a nervous breakdown but well embarked on one. The rest of the film is a crescendo of misfortune that’s as comical—how many lousy days in a row can this lady have?—as it is unsettling. The hole in the ceiling seems to expand, leaking goopy fluids like a festering wound. Or is that only Linda’s skewed perception of reality, frequently altered by the weed and alcohol with which she self-medicates nightly after her kid falls asleep?
A few people in Linda’s orbit try to offer guidance or friendship, including a worried doctor at her child’s clinic (played by the writer-director) and James (ASAP Rocky), the night superintendent at the motel where she’s temporarily lodged. But she alienates them one by one: To her, the physician’s concern reads as judgy condemnation of her chaotic parenting, and she responds with hostility and avoidance. She loses James’ goodwill by dragging him on an ill-fated field trip to see her collapsing ceiling. Even Linda’s therapist shows signs of losing his well-trained cool as she bursts into his sessions with other patients to drag him into her ever-worsening personal turmoil.
The very positive buzz around this film’s premiere at Sundance characterized it as “Uncut Gems for motherhood,” a comparison that makes sense given this fellow A24 film’s more than happenstance connection to the Safdie brothers’ work. Bronstein is married to the writer-director Ronald Bronstein, who serves as a producer on this film and who has often worked as a co-writer and co-editor on the Safdies’ movies, and it was shot by Christopher Messina, who has previously worked as a camera operator on the Safdies’ Good Time and Heaven Knows What. Byrne’s frenetic, self-lacerating performance also shares more than a little kinship with Adam Sandler’s two-hour-long meltdown in the brothers’ 2019 thriller about a gambling addict going down the tubes. Byrne is all but impossible to stop watching (not least because Messina often frames her exhausted features in tight close-up), even as she plays a woman who’s all but impossible to tolerate, much less like.
Linda may fall into a familiar character type—the dysfunctional but loving working mother, struggling to do the best she can in tough circumstances—but it must be said that her dysfunction goes well beyond that of your average kooky wine mom. She does things nearly every day that put her child in potential danger, many of them plainly illegal. She blames everyone but herself for her terrible choices and rarely has an even reasonably polite exchange with any other character. Linda’s inner state is so frenzied she has trouble focusing on anyone but herself (hence the technique of keeping her child’s face just offscreen). It’s a bold move for Bronstein to challenge the audience with a heroine this unlikable. But the script gives Byrne too few moments to modulate the intensity of her performance, or to communicate who Linda is in any register other than blind panic as she careens from one crisis to the next.
Byrne’s inventiveness as an actor, and her inherent likeability as a screen presence, manage to just get Linda under the wire as someone the viewer can root for (provided she can get it together on the child-safety front—but that’s a big “if”). But what the life circumstances were that put Linda on this path to self-destruction—how, not to put too fine a point on it, she came to be such a messy bitch—is something Bronstein’s script elides. One visual motif has Linda seeing flashing spots of white light whenever she looks at, or just imagines, that weirdly organic cavity in the ceiling. Is this recurring image meant to represent some painful memory trigger? When Linda reacts with primal terror to the black void she sees inside that circle of collapsed plaster, what is she really afraid of?
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The audience is left to solve such mysteries for ourselves, a move that respects our intelligence, but that also makes the would-be catharsis of the ending feel slightly unearned. I found myself admiring Byrne’s relentlessness and Bronstein’s commitment to immersing the viewer in Linda’s frantic daily reality, without feeling much investment in either characters or plot. As the credits rolled, I felt jittery and anxious, which is certainly one way of being viscerally affected, but this is a movie in which I never felt, for example, the urge to cry. Laughter is another story: One late scene engages in the kind of oh-no-they-didn’t grossout humor sometimes found in David Cronenberg’s work, culminating in a sight gag that had the entire theater squealing in disgusted delight. I clapped my hand to my mouth along with my fellow viewers, but the ending that soon followed left me unsure where the vertiginous journey we’d all just gone on together had been meant to take us.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is fueled by the manic energy of Byrne’s performance, but it isn’t a one-woman show. As was the case in his breakout role earlier this year in Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, ASAP Rocky continues to be a scene-stealing charisma bomb, here playing a much warmer and more easygoing character than his rage-driven kidnapper in that movie. But because the script neglects to sketch in even the most basic backstory for Rocky’s James, it’s hard to see what he has to gain in befriending this clearly unstable woman. Their relationship is not framed as romantic, and Linda seems too caught up in her own dramas to offer the laid-back James anything but a lot of headaches.
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The exact meaning of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’s title is never explained—everyone in sight, whatever their problems, has all their limbs—but the phrase captures the general mood of defiant if impotent fury. Bronstein expertly infuses the audience with Linda’s negative emotions, as if we were the ones hooked up to a feeding tube. But as I wrote just last week in a review of Benny Safdie’s first solo-directed feature The Smashing Machine, I’m not sure that simply being drawn into a troubled protagonist’s frenetic mental state constitutes the highest aim of cinema. I wanted the final frames of a film as stressful as this one was to leave me with a changed understanding of its maddening central character, and thereby, maybe, of motherhood, or mental illness, or some other aspect of the world around us. Instead I headed home in a state of shaky exhaustion, relieved to be free from Linda’s cacophonous, jarring, and lonely inner landscape.
