Picturehouse Blog

Sometimes the world seems to turn on you, and you have to either laugh, cry or scream. In Mary Bronstein's new film, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, Rose Byrne's Linda mostly skips the crying and just laughs and screams manically in all directions. The result is a film that's easy to relish but hard to define; it's probably best described as a dark comedy, but it plays like a thriller, with critics highlighting its intense rollercoaster of emotion that knocks the breath out of you at times. Everyone agrees, however, that it's anchored by a career-best performance from Byrne, who won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for her revelatory work.

The story will be familiar to many working parents. Linda is a psychotherapist and mother, who is managing on her own while her husband (Christian Slater) is away for work. However, the everyday problems she has to solve are mounting. The ceiling of their apartment has caved in and they're stuck in a seedy motel. Linda's own therapist and colleague, played by Conan O'Brien, doesn't seem to care, while she finds herself feuding with a parking attendant at her daughter's treatment centre. Plagued by insomnia, frustration and fury at an uncaring world, Linda takes to staying up late with motel janitor James (A$AP Rocky), trying to lose herself in booze, drugs and peanut-butter snacks.

It's a symphony of bad circumstances and imperfect coping mechanisms. Byrne has always had a knack for playing overachieving women - think of Bridesmaids or, on TV, Physical - but here she's stretched tight as a violin string and absolutely fed up of playing by everyone else's rules: you'll quickly see why she's drawn Oscar buzz. As Time Out says, "Rose Byrne delivers a tour de force of matriarchal fury."

She's helped by Bronstein's pin-sharp script and memorable supporting turns from O'Brien and Rocky. Neither are best known as actors but on this evidence maybe that should change. Rocky is particularly charismatic as the closest thing Linda has to a get-a-grip friend. Bathed in dyspeptic shades of fluorescent motel light and institutional grey, this doesn't glamourise the trials of parenthood. Partly inspired by Bronstein's own experiences of caring for a sick child, this was a passion project and a story she was determined to tell. The result is a frank and often very funny look at the ways we cope - or not - when things don't go our way. Helen O'Hara

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