If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: Rose Byrne – Photo: Logan White/A24
Motherhood might be one of the most fulfilling roles a person can take on in life, but it can be a thankless job. And the job of being a mother — the inescapable responsibilities, the endless checklist of physical, emotional, and operational demands — has rarely looked more thankless than it does for Rose Byrne’s Linda in the tense yet still comical If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
Linda is already dangling by a thin, fraying thread when we meet her, mildly crashing out at a conference with her daughter’s doctor. The exact nature of her child’s illness isn’t clear, but the details, involving the girl’s dependence on a feeding tube and its cumbersome accompanying equipment, sounds harrowing enough.
Writer-director Mary Bronstein, who also appears briefly in a small role, keeps the camera on Linda in that moment, moving in for a tighter and tighter closeup as the frazzled mom’s stress fills the frame.
The entire film focuses on Linda’s very immediate experience. Her daughter is heard, but glimpsed only partly. We don’t see her face, so she remains an abstraction — precious and innocent, but also a needy, demanding burden to Linda.
The suggestion that Linda has hit such a low point that she cannot even see her own child might lead us to believe she’s being dramatic, or selfish. That is, until we’ve walked a mile in her shoes and seen just how hellishly taxing her life has become.
The film is extremely effective at drawing us into Linda’s crucible of mounting catastrophes, starting with the flood that bursts down through the living room ceiling of their Montauk apartment. Linda and child are forced to relocate to a nearby motel, and a room barely big enough to accommodate the essential medical machinery.
Obligated to monitor her daughter’s vital signs at all times, she still sneaks out at night for a cigarette or hit of pot, and swigs of wine. To anyone paying attention, she might look negligent, but she has practically nowhere else to find relief.
Her therapist (a dryly funny Conan O’Brien) appears to have lost all patience with her, and merely seethes through their sessions. Her husband Charles, the girl’s beloved dad, is never home, always away working. Throughout the film, we hear his voice over the phone (the very recognizable Christian Slater), but he offers no real assistance, just pointed questions and pissy criticism about how she’s handling everything.
And she is the one handling everything, though he rarely acknowledges that fact. Byrne conveys with crack comic timing and an engaging sense of indignation the overwhelming weight on Linda’s shoulders, as she deals daily with contractors and her own workload as a therapist, her daughter’s doctor visits and messy around-the-clock care, frequent tantrums, one horrible new pet, and harried school drop-offs.
Echoing her therapist’s impatience, the school’s overzealous parking attendant (Mark Stolzenberg) constantly harasses her for parking in the drop-off lane long enough to wheel her daughter inside the school. Seriously, will no one cut Linda a break?
The stunning lack of empathy for her situation seems to be the film’s point. Linda’s world is crumbling around her through no fault of her own, yet at every turn she’s met not with kindness or generosity but with someone expressing a version of, “Lady, get your shit together.”
No one’s offering to lighten the load, or come to her rescue. She’s just supposed to cope and suffer, or go down in flames, for which she’ll be branded a horrible mother. Thankless. Welcome to 2025.
A possible angel in disguise appears in the form of James, a neighbor at the motel (and also the building super), played by rapper A$AP Rocky. Following up a strong performance in Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, Rocky is good here in a more complicated part as the one person who truly sees Linda.
James even helps her score some weed. But his interest in her is cloudy. Is he just being kind, or rather, does he see her as a potential hookup, or maybe a mark for some scheme? It’s hard to trust his intentions in this scenario, where the audience and Linda have come to expect the worst.
Remarkably, Linda’s situation actually does get worse, as one of her therapy clients, unstable mom Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), leaves her baby Riley in Linda’s care, then disappears. Seeing another mother feeling overwhelmed by it all might be what it takes to shake Linda from her relentless cycle of self-blame.
Or it might be the final stroke that sends her plummeting over the edge. “I’ll be better, I promise,” Linda insists. All she can do is try.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (★★★★☆) is rated R and playing in select theaters nationwide. Visit fandango.com.
The Black Phone 2 is what might happen if A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th had a three-way with Ice Castles -- and one of them popped out a baby.
That's not to say Scott Derrickson's crisply directed sequel to the 2022 box office hit The Black Phone -- once again co-written with C. Robert Cargill, and starring Mason Thames as Finney Blake, Madeleine McGraw as his psychic sister Gwen, and Ethan Hawke as the child-murdering (and probably more) serial killer The Grabber -- isn't a good scary movie. It's just not as good a scary movie as the first.
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Vargas sends the handheld camera roving behind the merry band of Uno (Jomari Angeles), Bay (Argel Saycon), Rush (Tommy Alejandrino), and Ge (Gold Aceron) on their nightly rounds in the city's margins. Peering over their shoulders as they cruise for clients in the bustling red light district, in public restrooms, inside an adult movie theater, the film smoothly maps out the guys' treacherous territory.
A new survey finds that many LGBTQ Americans -- especially transgender and nonbinary people -- have altered their lives in response to a wave of anti-LGBTQ laws and rhetoric sweeping the country, with many reporting serious harm to their mental health and overall wellbeing.
Conducted from May 29 to June 13 by NORC’s AmeriSpeak panel for the Movement Advancement Project, the online survey polled 1,055 LGBTQ adults nationwide, including 111 who identified as transgender or nonbinary.
Operated by NORC at the University of Chicago, AmeriSpeak is a probability-based panel designed to reflect the U.S. household population. Randomly selected households are contacted through mail, email, phone, or in-person interviews.
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