Review: "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" gives Rose Byrne a role that she rips into, but doesn't provide enough support for her brilliant performance

Rose Byrne gives the performance of her career in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” a dark yet weirdly manic drama that never matches what Byrne is giving.

Byrne’s character, Linda, has a lot going on. Her child, who is never named and almost never seen above the neck (she’s played by Delaney Quinn), suffers from some unexplained illness that requires Linda to feed her through a tube inserted in her belly. Linda’s husband is away on an extended business trip, and only a disembodied voice on the phone. (I didn’t look up who the actor was ahead of time, and I recommend you do the same.) 

And, one night, a massive water leak from the apartment upstairs rips a hole in Linda’s bedroom ceiling, and she and her child have to vacate for a motel, feeding tube and medical equipment in tow.

Through this, Linda tries to maintain her child’s medical appointments, and is admonished by the child’s doctor (played by the film’s writer-director, Mary Bronstein) that the child’s weight isn’t enough to allow the next surgical procedure. Linda tries to unburden herself to her therapist (played by Conan O’Brien), who has the office down the hall from Linda’s own practice — where her patients include a young mother (Danielle Macdonald), who seems to be in a worse state than her.

The only person Linda finds she can talk to is James (played by A$AP Rocky), who lives in the hotel and knows how to get weed. Soon the question becomes whether Linda will get a chance to pull herself together, or will she do down the psychic spiral that the hole in her apartment ceiling has come to represent for her.

Bronstein gives Byrne the space she needs to embrace Linda’s pain and anger from the no-win situation she’s been dealt by constantly having to subsume her needs for her daughter, her patients, or whoever is demanding her time in the moment. Unfortunately, it’s a performance trapped in a bell jar, with nowhere to go and no progress to be made. Byrne is magnificent, but that’s in part because she has to build the moments that the script never fully fleshes out for her. 

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‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 31, in theaters. Rated R for language, some drug use and bloody images. Running time: 113 minutes.