If I Had Legs I’d Kick You review: Rose Byrne’s brilliant breakdown

Played by Rose Byrne, the central character of Mary Bronstein’s excellent If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is backed into a corner.

Linda’s daughter – who is almost never shown on screen and never mentioned by name – has been living with a sickness for the past year that means she refuses to eat most solid food, and lives on packs of protein goo that are fed directly into her stomach through a tube.

Her husband, played through phone calls by Christian Slater, is at sea on an extended work trip. He’s a captain, but it’s never clear what kind of vessel he’s in charge of. The film obscures all of its characters in some way or another, but it’s much more fun than confusing.

What is clear is that the responsibility of looking after their daughter – filling her feeding bags, getting her to and from appointments, trying to navigate this mysterious, unexplained illness – falls on the mother.

A mother’s workload

Linda’s personal therapist, portrayed by a very dressed-down Conan O’Brien, seems uninterested in helping her work through any of her issues. On top of all of this, a giant hole has inexplicably opened in the ceiling of Linda’s apartment, flooding her bedroom and forcing her and her daughter to go and live in a motel, where the beeping of the monitors hooked up to her daughter continue all night.

The hole in the ceiling might sound like too obvious a metaphor. The film certainly makes sure you draw the connection between it and the hole in the daughter’s stomach. But If I Had Legs I’d Kick You has little need for subtlety. It’s a movie about a mother in freefall, a woman who has been, it seems, set up to fail as a mother.

As grim as that might sound, the film is, in fact, very entertaining. It’s full of weird digressions, strange side-characters and the interesting choices that often define great films.

Bronstein’s script makes it clear how the men, and the institutions, in Linda’s life have repeatedly failed her and her daughter (as well as other women). But it’s clear Bronstein knows her film can only work if Linda is, to put it politely, complicated.

Watch the If I Had Legs I’d Kick You trailer

Rose Byrne’s stellar performance

There’s a great push-and-pull throughout the movie. My sympathies wavered, strengthened and shifted several times throughout.

Linda spends the entire movie making bad but extremely relatable decisions. She returns to her apartment to stare into the hole several times throughout the film, and staring into it seems to reveal something to her. It’s up to viewers how far they want to let their own minds wander into that black void.

Rose Byrne gives the sort of performance where you can really see and appreciate the work going into it. With the film going to such lengths to keep her daughter off the screen, much of her performance is done in close-up, the outside world fading out of focus as Byrne pleads with the world to be a little more fair. It’s a tremendous, showy performance from an actor who is, basically, always good.

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If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is darkly hilarious too, the kind of movie where it’s a coin flip on some lines whether you’ll laugh or gasp.

Linda is constantly facing situations where she’s not quite sure how she should be reacting. The hotel manager, played by A$AP Rocky, is maybe obsessed with her but also maybe just trying to be nice; the company supposedly repairing the hole in the ceiling may or may not be making progress; the care staff looking after her daughter are either trying to help or actively want her to fail.

Her job (and it’s better if you go in not knowing what it is) layers irony over every other aspect of her life, and the plot veers in several unexpected directions. The persistent chorus of her unseen daughter – who is emotional and needy and truly very funny – hits that exact tonal balance. It’s not annoying for the audience but it makes total sense that it’s getting on her mother’s last nerve.

The talk show host who barely talks

The success of Conan O’Brien’s unusual casting is a pleasant surprise, too. He’s unavoidably distracting. The audience I saw the film with instinctively laughed whenever he appeared on screen, but his physical and performative transformation into a feckless, jowly therapist is a great success. Bronstein clearly understands how unnerving it is for Conan to sit quietly, observing but not speaking, for even a moment.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is not necessarily a movie with any grand messages or revelations. It’s slightly heavy-handed in places, and the extremely light patina or magical realism applied over a few scenes feels like it could have been pushed harder to more interesting effect. But If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is still a hoot. A difficult hoot, but a hoot nonetheless.

Come for Rose Byrne and Conan O’Brien, stay to see how long you can stare into the widening hole without flinching.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You screens 25 October as part of the Adelaide Film Festival and releases in cinemas 13 November.

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