Rose Byrne gets the mother of all roles as Linda in Mary Bronstein’s electrifying, emotional force field of a movie, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. While Byrne has built a career on deft comedic timing (whether in Spy or Bridesmaids) as well as nail-shredding dramatic chops (see TV’s Damages), her performance here is both a bruisingly funny and wounding aria of pain and frustration, of a woman screaming from the inside out, “I need help, I need help, I need help… but please don’t help me!”
On a deeper, inner register below the movie’s surface — a distorted funhouse of contemporary maternal dysfunction — Bronstein appears to have made a documentary about an actress, about an all-time performance, about Rose Byrne’s face, whose elastic expressiveness cinematographer Christopher Messina revels in discovering and rediscovering across scenes.
Linda is on a ledge she put herself on, content to admire the view rather than pull herself off it, and Byrne makes her vertiginous near-freefall dangerously compelling stuff. Take the fact that Linda is a psychotherapist whose own therapist (Conan O’Brien) works in the same practice and is also her supervisor.
It’s one quote-unquote bad decision after another — especially when it comes to Linda’s off-camera daughter, withering from a mystery illness — but Byrne sucks you into the whirlpool of Linda’s descent from rationality with an addictively watchable frenzy. She plays a mother who believes she was never meant to be one — which comes crashing down like the ceiling in her Montauk apartment during a throwdown, God-help-me plea to her therapist that is spectacularly heartbreaking but also risibly funny in the same breath.
Byrne doesn’t make Linda’s traumas universal on purpose — that was never the assignment in Bronstein’s specific story of motherhood in crisis, not intended to be relatable to all. But in rendering her character’s present-day response to them so specifically and urgently, they become universal before us on the screen. Hers is the sort of performance that makes you go, “If she doesn’t get an Oscar nomination, then this whole system is broken!” But in this case, it’s vividly, vitally true.