If I Had Legs I’d Kick You review – Rose Byrne more than deserves her Oscar nod for this maternal endurance test

No wonder Rose Byrne’s been nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as a beleaguered mother in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. It’s less performance, more self-administered open heart surgery. Come on, take a look inside – there’s no poeticism and no beautiful agonies, only piles and piles of viscera. Her eyelids look so heavy you can’t tell if she’s about to fall asleep, or traverse the astral plane, or if she’s just consumed enough analgesics to mellow out a racehorse. And her mouth is downturned at such a severe angle it feels dangerous to be in her sightline, in case she either a) vomits, b) starts screaming, or c) does both at the same time.

Some of the best portraits of conflicted mothers, such as Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love or Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, extend beyond descriptors like “messy” and “complex”. Instead, they start to scratch at the intolerable contradiction of the mother: sanctified, even by the atheists, yet left socially adrift, without the community and the support such an elevated role would surely require. It means there’s no margin for error. Heavy is the crown, but no one even told the mother how to put it on her head in the first place.

It’s what drives Byrne’s character, Linda, to sit opposite her therapist (Conan O’Brien, wonderfully unhelpful) and beg, “I’m asking you what I’m supposed to do... I just want someone to tell me what to do.” Her daughter, unnamed and largely unseen, has a chronic illness that requires a feeding tube. Her voice chirps constantly in her mother’s ear – all the food she won’t eat, all the discomfort she feels, and the hamster she feverishly covets.

Linda’s husband (Christian Slater) is a boat captain, absent except as another chirping voice, chastising her down the phone for every conceivable mistake. Linda is herself a therapist. Her patients chirp. At home, a great big watery hole has opened up in the ceiling, forcing her and her daughter to decamp to a motel. Somehow it has things to say, too. It’s all so loud that the one person in the film who actually seems to listen, motel receptionist James (rapper A$AP Rocky), is barely registered by Linda.

Writer-director Mary Bronstein pushes her camera in, further and further onto Linda’s face until it practically feels like we’re sitting in her eyeballs. It’s an endurance test of a film, the kind that sometimes seems hard to recommend without sounding like a masochist. Bronstein’s style is often linked to that of the Safdie brothers – her husband Ronald is a frequent collaborator of theirs, having recently co-written and co-edited Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme.

It’s relevant here to look at how both Bronstein’s and the Safdies’ work has changed over the years (this is her second movie, after 2008’s Yeast), in a way that perhaps heralds a wider shift in American film. All three started in what was termed “mumblecore”, typified by Andrew Bujalski and Greta Gerwig, and by a comparatively idealistic approach, where characters were free to wander aimless and buried in their own self-conflicted thoughts. Here, it’s nothing but overstimulation and the capitalistic death drive, an ever-escalating muchness that leads Linda to reflect: “Time is a series of things to get through.”

Yet what keeps the film’s heart tender is the fact that, even if Linda’s been reduced to a husk, she’s still a mother who loves her daughter; who knows she’s in pain and can’t help her outbursts. She still sits at her daughter’s bedside and sings, gently, like a bird. She still wants to try, even when she fails. And that’s something to count on.

Dir: Mary Bronstein. Starring: Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, Danielle Macdonald, Christian Slater, A$AP Rocky. Cert 15, 114 minutes.

‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’ is in cinemas from 20 February