The Virtuosic Maternal Freakout of “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” | ‘If I Had Legs I’d Ki…

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The Virtuosic Maternal Freakout of “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”

“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” a nerve-shredding dark comedy from the director and screenwriter Mary Bronstein, is the latest and surely most exhaustive iteration of an idea that has gained increasing traction in American movies: motherhood is hell, and a mother enduring that hell should say so, without fear of judgment. Marielle Heller’s “Nightbitch” (2024), drawn from Rachel Yoder’s novel, laid out a higher-concept version of this argument: it showed us an artist so drained and defeated by life with a toddler that she transformed into a feral canine at night—a quasi-supernatural twist that, for all its cleverness, felt oddly neutered in the translation from page to screen. The director Maggie Gyllenhaal dramatized maternal ambivalence more incisively in her adaptation, from 2021, of the Elena Ferrante novel “The Lost Daughter,” about a middle-aged professor who spends a coastal holiday reflecting on the failure of being, in her words, “an unnatural mother.”

Conan O’Brien on how his Boston Irish roots influenced his dramatic debut in ‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’

Stepping into his first major dramatic acting role after an acclaimed career in comedy, Conan O’Brien was understandably “very nervous,” he said, before shooting began for the A24 film “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.”

In fact, the Brookline native admitted during a recent interview with the Globe over Zoom that he even tried talking writer-director Mary Bronstein out of casting him in the film altogether after they first met (“He didn’t win that battle,” joked the filmmaker), ultimately saying yes, thanks to her confidence in him.

“I just didn’t want, in any way, to jeopardize this thing she had made,” said O’Brien, 62. “But Mary said, ‘You can do this,’ and I said, ‘OK, let’s go.’”

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