“Mommy is stretchy,” a young girl observes of her mother at the start of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You . Linda, the mother, bristles at the description, but it’s an apt one. How many mothers are made to extend themselves for others again and again—and how long can they do that before they snap? That, in a sense, is the story of motherhood, and what Mary Bronstein’s new film captures with bruising, darkly funny precision.

Rose Byrne , in a career-high performance, plays Linda, a therapist in Montauk barely holding it together as she cares for her daughter, who is suffering from a mysterious illness, and the world collapses around her. Her apartment’s ceiling falls in, forcing her and her daughter into a motel; a patient disappears; and Linda’s clueless husband, away on business, berates he

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