If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Linda is a working New York City mom at the end of her rope. When one day the ceiling literally collapses on her head, she is forced to face another crisis and move into a cheap motel with her young daughter, while navigating negotiations with inert repairmen, her child’s mysterious illness, an absent husband, a missing patient, and a parade of people who are unable and unwilling to help her.

If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You is a surreal, dark-humorous chronicle of a mental breakdown and motherhood on the brink. It is woven from those painfully absurd, yet hilarious moments when love is not enough, as waves of frustration, helplessness and anger wash over viewers from the screen. Rose Byrne’s bravura acting performance earned her a Silver Bear, a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. In the film, she is joined by TV host Conan O’Brien (as a scornful and disinterested psychotherapist), Harlem rapper A$AP Rocky (as a charming but troubled motel manager), and director Mary Bronstein herself as the irritating and condescending Doctor Spring. The hallucinogenic rhythm and movement of the camera, cloaked by the film’s anxious atmosphere, open up cracks between the banality of everyday neurosis and the paranoid abyss of madness. Motherhood shouldn’t be like this, or this is what Linda desperately wants to convince herself as an uneasy silence overwhelms her, and the hole in the ceiling grows bigger and bigger. Throughout the film, we laugh and lose our minds together with this imperfect, difficult and complicated woman lacking maternal instincts, traumatized by expectations and circumstances over which she has no control – when she thinks things can’t get any worse, they only get worse. As Linda unsuccessfully balances the chaos that her professional and personal lives have turned into, we chant along: “It’s not fair, but it’s your own fault”, and fall into an endless spiral of doubt.