Review: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Director:  Mary Bronstein

Stars:  Rose Byrne, A$AP Rocky, Conan O’Brien

We begin in extreme close-up on Rose Byrne’s (unnamed in the film) Linda. Uncomfortably close. Her face fills the screen. Should we want to, we could investigate every pore. A therapist herself, she’s in session with director Mary Bronstein’s Dr Spring, and Linda’s unnamed and almost completely unseen daughter (Delaney Quinn). While the conversation is intended to be focused on the needs of the child, Dr Spring grows more interested and concerned about Linda’s state of mind. Over the course of the ensuing two hours, so will we.

It’s been 18 years – give or take – since Bronstein’s mumblecore debut Yeast, and to find her returning in such propulsive, bombastic form is thrilling. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a fever dream of (semi)single motherhood that rapidly turns nightmare. An anxiety ride worthy of the Safdie brothers (oh look, Josh Safdie and Marty Supreme scribe Ronald Bronstein are producers here). It sits within a run of new films that deal – unflinchingly – with unvarnished, unfinished and unravelling women (see also Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love, Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water). And if this primal scream of frustration is the product of those 18 years, well, it was worth it.

At the top of the picture Linda and her daughter are displaced from their Montauk apartment when the master bedroom roof caves in under a gushing water leak. The chasm is ripe with metaphorical potential; a dangerous, volatile psychological black hole which inexorably draws Linda in, linking to a miasma of past traumas. It’s not the only such curious aperture in the film. Linda’s daughter is a special needs child in the sense that she requires nightly dialysis and has a tube fitted to a cavity in her stomach. These are dual sources of threat and tension as Linda spirals from a lack of sleep and lack of support when the two of them make a supposedly temporary move to a rundown hotel.

The film then ricochets through the next few weeks in Linda’s life, between exasperated phone calls with her ex Charlie (Christian Slater), unresponsive sessions with her colleague/therapist (Conan O’Brien) and increasingly erratic nights when Linda leaves her sleeping daughter unattended to wallow in drug and alcohol jags which frequently find her answering a siren call back to her partially destroyed apartment and that whole in the ceiling.

With the latter escapades Bronstein quite actively provokes the audience to make judgements of Linda, mirrored within the film when her protagonist butts up against group therapy sessions that try to coddle notions of blame. IIHLIKY is interested in notions of responsibility. The weariness of parenting, and the assumed notion from childhood that there’ll be a point in adulthood when one becomes ‘finished’. A shimmer forever somewhere over the horizon. For Linda, chasing that moment has created an unwieldy fatigue. Tired of the struggle, she just wants someone to tell her what to do.

In session with a potentially volatile patient named Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), Linda transfers onto the young mother, advising her that coping means, “You need to keep moving”. Bronstein’s film certainly adheres to this council. With the aid of cinematographer Christopher Messina and editor Lucian Johnston, Bronstein successfully creates a sense of constant careening. It’s a picture that hurtles past you. At no point did I ponder how far through it we were. There simply isn’t time for such second guessing. That’s a credit to the structure and pacing of the piece, but also to Bronstein’s caustically dark sense of humour and the barnstorming central performance from Byrne.

While being rip-roaringly entertaining, IIHLIKY has the confidence to dead-eye some taboos that still remain around motherhood, particularly aspects of post-natal depression or the none-more-sinful suggestion that maybe not everyone’s cut-out for the job. When Caroline goes AWOL mid-session, she becomes a threatening negative space in the film – another chasm if you will – provoking the suggestion that she represents one possible future for Linda as she starts coming undone. The decision to keep Linda’s daughter unnamed and out of frame also feels like a deliberate effort to goad the audience into a set of assumptions. I certainly started to fear, quite quickly, that I’d rooted out a potential outcome; a wearying cliché. I was happy to be proved wrong and, in retrospect, suspect this was a path I was placed on to further corral a sense of impending doom.

If there’s nitpicking to do here, it’s that Linda is arguably saved by the intervention of a man – a pristine figure in uniform, no less – and that this eleventh hour support somewhat undermines the stridently feminist screed that the rest of the film is projecting. Still, so much of IIHLIKY is a rallying cry for the unsupported mothers in society who carry the world on their backs without a moment’s peace. How much can we criticise Linda for her dangerous nighttime dalliances and suspect interactions with friendly neighbour James (an excellent bit of supporting work from A$AP Rocky)? Probably quite a bit, but still… Bronstein is keen to get us investigating where those limits lie.

This is first rate indie cinema. The kind of ‘dramedy’ that blows away the assumptions that come with such a moniker. Sitting in the theatre with it is quite the experience (kudos to the efforts of the sound design team, particularly a late sequence that has us roiling in the sea – an overwhelming and wantonly abstract expression of tumult). The ending, meanwhile, feels like a daring reimagining of the outcome of Eraserhead, where a final sheer descent is met with an eerily serene promise.

If I had Legs I’d Kick You is a riveting ride that ought to place Bronstein at the forefront of everyone’s list of must-watch filmmakers.