Format: Streaming video from HBO on various players.
I’ve talked a little bit about what my life was like in 2025, but I haven’t really gone into a great deal of detail. It was the worst year of my life by a pretty good margin. When I had a conversation with my boss about what I had accomplished in 2025 with a look toward 2026, my answer was that my biggest accomplishment was that I hit all of my deadlines—all of my students’ papers and projects got back to them on time. There were a lot of times during the year where it felt like I was always on the edge of a complete breakdown—it was a combination of the events happening around me and the reactions of other people to those events in some cases. All of this brings me to If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, a movie I don’t think I could have made it through had I attempted to watch it last year.
If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You (I’m going to shorten this to just the pre-comma part of the title for the rest of this) feels like a modern update of Diary of a Mad Housewife combined with the white anger film Falling Down. Linda (Rose Byrne, who was Oscar-nominated for this role and the reason I watched it) is a woman whose life is falling apart on every front. My situation last year was plenty bad, but I have nothing on Linda.
For starters, Linda’s unnamed daughter (Delaney Quinn) is dealing with an equally unnamed illness. What we learn is that she has a feeding disorder—she doesn’t eat much, requires a feeding tube at night, and spends her day in a program at a hospital. Linda works as a therapist; her clients are superficial and self-absorbed. One client, Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), is paranoid about her new child, and at one point abandons the child in Linda’s office. Her husband Charles (Christian Slater) works as a ship captain and is often not at home, leaving Linda alone to deal with everything. And when the film starts, the family apartment is flooded from the apartment above, collapsing the ceiling in one room. Linda is sleep-deprived from having to live in a motel in proximity of her daughters feeding pump, the clerk in the hotel (Ivy Wolk) is rude and aggressive to her, and the contractor fixing the ceiling has disappeared for a week because his mother has died. The doctor at the hospital (writer/director Mary Bronstein) is aggressive. And Linda’s therapist (Conan O’Brien!) treats her with contempt.
This, honestly, is the entire movie. We see Linda’s life spiral out of control with none of it being her fault but all of it being her responsibility. The closest thing she gets to help is Jamie (A$AP Rocky), the superintendent of the motel where Linda is staying. Linda spends her nights drinking wine, smoking pot, and spending time outside of her motel room, sometimes walking back to her ruined apartment. She knows that she shouldn’t be leaving her daughter, but can’t stand not having the freedom to even walk outside without being judged.
Everything in Linda’s life feels on the brink, and every moment of If I Had Legs is just another thing that is pushing her closer and closer to a complete breakdown. Everything happening is a burden and there is nothing and no one who will help her carry it. That’s it; that’s the movie. We’re just watching to see how far it can go.
This is a difficult movie to watch. It took me a long time to get through it because I needed to take breaks from it and walk away sometimes. Linda’s life is oppressive and claustrophobic entirely because she has no one in it that she can depend on while everyone is depending on her. Linda is supposed to be the pillar of strength in everyone’s life, but has no one who realizes that she needs that in her life as well.
Rose Byrne is the reason I watched If I Had Legs because of her nomination. She was sadly in the same position as Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon--she gives the performance of her career and of a lifetime, and simply happens to do so in a year where someone else did the same thing to more acclaim. Byrne’s bigger problem here is that Linda is not a likeable person in a lot of respects. A lot of what Linda does is wrong—leaving her daughter for long periods of time, hunting for illicit drugs on the Dark Web with Jamie—but are completely understandable, at least in some respects, given the situation she is in. Linda does the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, but it feels justified, at least to her. The problem is that this doesn’t win awards. You can be a saint and win or unredeemably evil and win, but you can’t win an Oscar by playing someone who is just kind of shitty.
Is this a metaphor for the way women are treated in general? That women are forced to do all of the emotional labor in relationships almost by fiat because most men are incapable of doing it or even considering that emotional labor actually exists? Perhaps, but more to the point is simply the idea of Linda clearly suffering not in silence or a vacuum, but in a world where literally no one cares.
This is not a film I’d want to watch again, but it’s a film that I think everyone should see.
Why to watch If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You: It feels like real life.
Why not to watch: It’s exhausting.
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