By Betsy Sherman

If I Had Legs is a powerful addition to the recent female-created examinations of the ways women, and particularly mothers, can be unsupported or outright dismissed by contemporary society.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, directed by Mary Bronstein. Playing at the Coolidge Corner Theatre, AMC Boston Common 19.

Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Photo: Logan White/Courtesy of Sundance Institute

In director-writer Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the viewer is dropped without exposition into the challenging life of its protagonist. The ungentle but fundamentally empathetic dark-comic drama looks at a woman flailing through a personal and family crisis. It features a brilliantly agile performance by Rose Byrne that’s also something of an endurance test.

Byrne’s character is the flawed, assailed Linda. In the initial scene, and much of the movie, the camera is tightly focused on Linda’s face. While we hear the off-screen voices of a little girl (Linda’s daughter) and woman (the daughter’s doctor), the site of tension concerns the muscles surrounding Byrne’s eyes. They contract, and are moistened by angry tears, as the girl says something Linda doesn’t want to hear: that Mommy is stretchable, like putty, while Daddy is hard (that is, he won’t give in). This suggestion of weakness is one of a series of provocations that the overwhelmed mom perceives as unfair (“I’m not putty,” she retorts).

A little thing, perhaps, but boy, do those add up. If I Had Legs is a powerful addition to the recent female-created examinations of the ways women, and particularly mothers, can be unsupported or outright dismissed by contemporary society. It forges a path of its own, with moments of humor and absurdism to let off steam from the Cassavetes-style tone of agitation. Linda rages against the unfairness of her isolation, guilt over not being able to improve her daughter’s situation, and primal fear that she’ll do something bad enough to (figuratively) get thrown out of the tribe.

Linda’s daughter, whose name and face are withheld from the audience (perhaps to reflect Linda’s avoidance) is under medical care for an unnamed disease due to which she hasn’t been eating enough. She has a feeding tube attached to her stomach. Linda’s husband, Charles, is in the military and will be away from their Montauk, New York, home for several months. To us, therefore, he’s mainly an argumentative voice on the phone. Linda sees a psychotherapist—a pinched, constipated-looking fellow played spot-on by Conan O’Brien (he doesn’t get a name either, just “Therapist”). Linda’s session with him feels more like a sparring match than an invitation to arrive at insights (she asks if he read the email she sent about her dream, and he answers with a chilly “I don’t respond to my client’s dream emails”). Linda leaves his office, walks a few doors down, and enters her own office. It’s a surprise (but somehow apt) that this walking mess is also a psychotherapist.

Linda and her daughter return home to find the apartment’s ceiling is leaking. Within minutes, part of the ceiling crashes onto the parents’ bed. The resulting hole takes on a cosmic import for Linda, suggesting its a portal to elsewhere in the universe. Out of the twinkly skyscape emerges a cacophony of voices, those of children and adults. The two move to a cheap hotel, taking along the medical machinery to which the daughter must be attached overnight. Once the girl is tucked into bed, Linda slides into a spiral of unhelpful behavior—oh well, at least she takes the baby monitor with her—wandering the area and escaping with the help of wine, weed, and sugar. One night, she watches an ‘80s gore movie on TV that I think is Flesh-Eating Mothers. She hangs with the hotel’s affable super, Jamie, who slyly observes what she’s getting up to.

The frequent trips to the hospital include going to a support group for families of child patients (only women are present). Bronstein herself plays the aforementioned doctor who leads the group. The scathing scene includes a closeup of a cake inscribed “It’s Not Your Fault.” Today’s topic will be shame and blame. Disgusted by the condescension, Linda lets out her anger (“You set us up to fail!”) and storms out.

Linda’s sense of boundaries has gone out of whack. She feels guilt for sneaking away from her child, telling her therapist, “I shouldn’t want to leave her for a second.” Linda’s car is the place where we hear the most sustained mother-daughter conversations; indeed, she “stretches” to demands. The hole in the ceiling remains unfixed and Linda can’t get her landlord to take her seriously. Her hangovers and fatigue don’t help her work with her clients. And she thinks the hospital’s parking lot attendant is out to get her. At the other extreme, O’Brien’s phlegmatic therapist sets out too-rigid boundaries, making the characters’ interplay often very funny. He does open up, at one point, relating a disturbing experience from his past, involving rodents.

In cinematic terms, most of the interactions in If I Had Legs are presented shot-reverse shot, with each face getting its own frame. But the configuration changes during Linda’s session with a patient whose story intertwines with her own. A young woman named Caroline has recently given birth, and may be experiencing postpartum depression. In a composition that shows Linda and Caroline facing each other, something—someone—is in between them. A baby carrier with a blue blanket over it contains the infant, Riley. Caroline is both fearful of Riley and afraid that someone will hurt him (there are references to a killer-nanny case and to Andrea Yates, who murdered her children). When Caroline leaves to take a bathroom break and doesn’t come back, Linda lifts the blanket and baby Riley, clenching his little fists, gets his own extreme close-up. This abandonment is too close to home for Linda.

Linda clings to the notion that once her daughter’s tube is removed—and the ceiling is fixed—things will go back to normal. By the end, when the family of three is reunited, at least for a while, the sense of a fever breaking may not signal a happy ending. But a song sung by mother and daughter, and reprised during the end credits, serves as a life raft. Harry Nilsson’s Think About Your Troubles presents a clear-eyed view of life as circular, and uses sharp humor to get past the fear of death and recognize impermanence.

If I Had Legs’ director of photography, Christopher Messina, is a valuable collaborator here. As well as the great performances from Byrne and O’Brien, there are terrific turns by Danielle MacDonald (star of the 2017 Patti Cake$) as Caroline; Daniel Zolghagri (star of the 2022 Funny Pages) as Linda’s patient Stephen, who’s infatuated with her; A$AP Rocky (Highest 2 Lowest) as Jamie; and Delaney Quinn, who’s heard and partially seen as the daughter. Bronstein’s filmmaker husband Ron Bronstein—who directed one of my favorite no-budget indies, Frownland—is the voice on the phone of Caroline’s husband, who’s profoundly indifferent to his parenting duties. Mary and Ron have a daughter, Faye Bronstein, to whom If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is dedicated.

Betsy Sherman has written about movies, old and new, for The Boston Globe, The Boston Phoenix, and The Improper Bostonian, among others. She holds a degree in archives management from Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. When she grows up, she wants to be Barbara Stanwyck.