Grace in a delicate balancing act

ROSE BYRNE DRAWS ACCLAIM IN A BOLD PIVOT FROM COMEDY TO TAKE ON FRAUGHT MOTHERHOOD IN HER NEW FILM, 'IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU'

- ESTHER ZUCKERMAN

ROSE BYRNE likes the idea of walking on a tightrope. It’s a metaphor she brings up more than once when we discuss her bracing performance as an overextended mother caring for a severely ill child in the upcoming film “If I Had Legs I'd Kick You.”

“Anything dealing with motherhood and shame around motherhood, whether it’s disappointment, failure — she’s got this line in the movie, ‘I wasn’t meant to do this’ — these are pretty radical things to say,” Byrne explains. “People aren’t comfortable with that. So performance-wise, that was the hardest part because it was like a tightrope — the tightrope of this woman.”

Over our iced beverages, an Arnold Palmer for her and a hibiscus iced tea for me, I ask her why that idea is so appealing to her, the notion of putting herself into roles where she has to teeter on the precipice of hysterical laughter and utter tragedy.

Byrne, who has a habit of clutching her long fingers to her face while she speaks, muses for a bit but ultimately comes back to her own favorite performances. The ones that are funny, unpredictable and spontaneous.

“A bit like life,” she says.

For Byrne, “If I Had Legs I'd Kick You,” hitting theaters Friday, is the ultimate example of this kind of balancing act. The challenge is paying off: Byrne, 46, earned rave reviews when the film debuted at Sundance with praise especially being heaped on her unvarnished, full-throttle work, perhaps her best ever. She later won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, that event’s highest acting honor.

“She turned herself inside out and upside down and every which way availed herself to me creatively in such an open, radical way that she deserves everything — all the trophies,” the movie's director, Mary Bronstein, says in a video interview.