Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series highlighting the buzziest scripts of the awards season continues with the tense dramatic comedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, writer-director Mary Bronstein‘s sophomore feature film that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Rose Byrne stars as a therapist who increasingly spirals as her life gets out of her control, as her helplessness over her daughter’s mystery illness is compounded by a patient who goes missing, an absentee husband and her own therapist trying to abandon her. Conan O’Brien plays the therapist, while Danielle Macdonald, Christian Slater, A$ap Rocky and Delaney Quinn also star.
The movie, Bronstein’s follow-up to her 2028 debut Yeast starring Greta Gerwig, has been racking up accolades since Park City. Bronstein scored Gotham Awards nominations for the script and for directing, while Byrne has been on a roll since winning the Leading Performer award at Berlin, with Best Actress noms at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice, the Gothams and the Spirit Awards along with several critics group nods.
Bronstein has said the idea from the movie came from her own experiences as a mother and dealing with a family illness; though she says the story is not factually autobiographical, it is “emotionally accurate” in its sometimes witty, more often feverish snapshot of a mother who doesn’t feel she is doing enough in any capacity. An important element to Bronstein: showing exactly what that anxiety and shame looks like, something she said she hadn’t seen in previous movies.
To nail it, it took her seven years to develop the script. “I really felt like I needed to make this movie,” she says. “I had complete tunnel vision and honestly, that was the only way to get it done.”
Read her screenplay below.
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