If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

PopEntertainment
Oct 20
3 min read

IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU (2025)

Starring Rose Byrne, Conan O'Brien, Danielle Macdonald, Christian Slater, ASAP Rocky, Ivy Wolk, Daniel Zolghadri, Delaney Quinn, Ronald Bronstein, Lark White, Josh Pais, Eva Kornet, Mark Stolzenberg, Helen Hong, Ella Beatty, Manu Narayan, Amy Judd Lieberman, Char Sidney, Jodi Pynn Gabree, Alan Scott, Jason Matthews and Victor Broadley.

Screenplay by Mary Bronstein.

Directed by Mary Bronstein.

Distributed by A24. 113 minutes. Rated R.

Screened at the 2025 Philadelphia Film Festival.

Okay, first things first. Linda – the lead character of this movie, played by Rose Byrne – does have legs. She is able to use them throughout the entire running time of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Honestly, a lack of limbs is one of very few problems that life does not throw at her.

So, why is this movie called If I Had Legs I’d Kick You? Honestly, I’m not certain, but it’s a striking title which does capture Linda’s feelings of overwhelming inadequacy and powerlessness.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is an alternately funny and horrific vision of a woman completely losing control of her life and mind, all in real time. It features a scorching, desperate and yet weirdly humorous performance from Byrne – who has long been a much better actor than she is sometimes given credit for. With that in mind, it is really saying something to say that this is possibly the best work Byrne has ever done on film.

Linda is a psychologist in a tiny practice in Southern California, cheesily called The California Institute of Psychological Arts (and you know that it’s a small-time set-up when they hire someone as clearly unmoored as Linda to counsel people’s mental health).

Linda’s life is in a constant state of panic. She is trying to deal with all of the problems that life is throwing at her but is failing miserably.

Her daughter (Delaney Quinn) has a mysterious illness which forces her to be fed by a tube which goes directly into her stomach. (In an interesting-but-successful directing technique, the daughter is never directly shown until the very end of the film. Until then, you just see flashes of her feet, her back, her stomach, or her hair.)

Linda’s husband (Christian Slater) is a ship captain who is almost always away, becoming just a voice on a phone to her. Linda and her daughter have to live in a cheesy seashore motel because their condo has been damaged by a water leak which has caused a gaping hole in the roof and black mold and debris throughout the place. Linda can’t get anyone to fix the house.

Linda can’t seem to deal with anyone – not her daughter’s doctor, who keeps trying to set up meetings with her, not the men supposed to be fixing her place, not the night manager at her motel, not her patients, not her own psychologist and co-worker, an extremely dry, bitter and stuffy man (played against type by a surprisingly dour and dramatic Conan O’Brien).

She feels guilty when one of her patients, a deeply religious woman, abandons her baby in Linda’s office and just disappears.

She kind of befriends – at least as close to friendship as Linda can get right now – a fellow motel resident (A$AP Rocky), with whom she surfs the dark web looking for drugs. She wants to numb herself, but life won’t stop intruding upon her desperate need for some kind of serenity.

That is essentially the experience of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – watching a woman spinning further and further out of control until she reaches an inevitable explosion.

As one of the other critics at the screening I saw said, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is an extremely well-made film with a spectacular lead performance by Rose Byrne, but I can’t imagine ever wanting to watch it again. And that’s okay, there are lots of films that I never wanted to revisit – for example Schindler’s List and Brokeback Mountain – but that doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that they were terrific works of cinema. If I Had Legs is not at those films’ level, but I’m very glad that I saw it once, even if I probably never will again.