Two films focus on put-together women falling apart

There are so few substantial roles for women at the movies these days, getting a couple of barn-burners in the same week is a cause for celebration. Julia Roberts and Rose Byrne deliver two of the more spectacular performances you’re going to see this year, playing flinty, difficult characters blessedly unconcerned with eliciting the audience’s sympathies in Luca Guadagnino’s “After the Hunt” and Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” respectively. The former is an entertainingly trashy, star-studded provocation while the latter is an indie psychodrama boasting some of the most audacious laughs in recent memory. Both films focus on put-together female professionals falling apart, with their lead actresses in top form as women on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Roberts has been coasting in fluff and doing TV for so long you can forget that she’s one of our most magnetic movie stars. I think she forgets sometimes, too. “After the Hunt” feels like the actress’ attempt to reclaim her title, bulldozing her way through the role of a Yale philosophy professor who starts spiraling when her favorite colleague and drinking buddy (an endearingly dissolute Andrew Garfield) is accused of sexual misconduct by her most promising pupil, played by Dorchester’s own Ayo Edebiri. The student initially refuses to explain what her attacker allegedly did, insisting only to her professor that he “crossed the line” in an atmosphere where allegations alone are enough to end careers.

Director Guadagnino is antsy and antagonistic from the jump. He starts the film with Roberts lecturing on Michel Foucault’s assertion that ceremonial public torture is necessary to maintain the social contract, before shock-cutting to an opening credits sequence set to old-timey music with the white-on-black Windsor Light font that’s the trademark of cancel culture casualty Woody Allen. Paranoid and pushing the audience’s buttons with fat, clumsy thumbs, “After the Hunt” aims to poke at touchy subjects most movies avoid, tackling issues of race, elitism, power dynamics and consent without having anything substantive or even coherent to say about any of them. The movie just wants to play with firecrackers.

Yet the thing about fireworks is that they can make for an exciting show. While I could never in good conscience call “After the Hunt” a good movie — it’s hamstrung by a silly thriller structure dependent on dumb revelations and Edebiri gives a terrible performance in an unplayable role — there’s an irresponsible swagger to the picture that’s undeniably fun to watch. Bleach blonde and wearing black nail polish, Roberts hasn’t had a role this juicy in eons, trying to stay on the tenure track while being eaten alive by stomach ulcers and an increasing exasperation with her coddled students. The pretty woman is always best when she’s being prickly, and she serves up some incredible takedowns of academic language here. (RIP to the trendy term “othering.”) It’s like Roberts got jealous while watching Cate Blanchett in “TÁR” and called her agents saying, “Get me one of those.”

Garfield is great fun as the caddish accused, whose chest-bearing denim shirts make him the only philosophy instructor at Yale who dresses like Kris Kristofferson. Michael Stuhlbarg is a fussy delight as Roberts’ embittered, emasculated husband, blasting experimental music from the kitchen where he cooks away his frustrations. Chloë Sevigny co-stars as the school’s exhausted shrink. She and Roberts share a doozy of a scene where they’re wrapping up a wine bender at a campus bar — everyone in this movie is a raging alcoholic — surrounded by students and ranting about the hypersensitivity of these entitled little brats. Watching these two Gen X icons boozing it up while smoking butts and complaining about the damn kids today made this 50-year-old feel pandered to in ways that were not entirely unpleasurable.

Like many Ivy League school psychiatrists, I imagine, Sevigny has the poster for the “Dirty Harry” sequel “Magnum Force” hanging on her office wall. It’s one of many inexplicable visual choices by Guadagnino, who often seems to get bored with all this dialogue so he cuts to oddball angles and jarring closeups of his actors’ hands, adding to the picture’s air of agitated incoherence. Legendary cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed hasn’t shot a movie since revolutionizing the look of urban crime films with “Belly” back in 1998, and how he was coaxed back to features for this one is a mystery more compelling than any in the film itself.

It's been 17 years since writer-director Mary Bronstein’s amazingly abrasive debut film “Yeast,” in which she and Greta Gerwig played childhood friends on a camping trip discovering just how violently they’ve grown to despise each other as adults. Bronstein’s serrated sensibility has not softened over time. Her long-awaited sophomore effort, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” is the story of a mom ground down to her very last nerve. It’s about life giving you a bum deal and feeling like you’re not up to the task. Every scene in the movie is a mini-anxiety attack, rattling in extreme closeups on star Rose Byrne while a cacophonous world roars at and around her, shrieking reminders of her shortcomings as a mother and a human being. The film would probably be unwatchable if it wasn’t so horrifically funny.

Byrne plays Linda, a Long Island psychiatrist tending to her sick daughter while her husband (Christian Slater) is away on week three of a two-month work trip. The kid suffers from an unspecified disorder where she refuses to eat and must be fed nightly through a tube. A leaky pipe has left a massive hole in the bedroom ceiling, sending mother and child to reside in a slightly seedy motel while obstreperous contractors do little to fix it. Sometimes late at night, when Linda’s wasted on weed and wine, she sneaks back to her house so she can stare at the hole — a dripping black maw that seems to be expanding like a cosmic externalization of her inadequacies.

In Bronstein’s boldest gambit, the child is never seen on camera. She’s always just offscreen or out of frame, a structuring absence sapping away her mother’s attention and energy. Another hole. With a different actress, this might have been excruciating, but Byrne has an innately comic energy, inviting us to laugh at Linda’s messy foibles and misfortunes. In his first dramatic acting role, Conan O’Brien co-stars as her buttoned-up therapist, recoiling from his patient’s increasingly inappropriate efforts to puncture his professional reserve. The comedian’s emotionally constipated Boston Irishness is used to brilliant effect against Byrne’s unhinged outbursts, so uncomfortable he shrinks into himself like he’s imploding before our eyes.

Byrne won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, and it’s rare to see such an attractive star so unconcerned with being likable. That’s why we like her. Linda is being irrational and awful a lot of the time — this is very much the movie last year’s “Nightbitch” was afraid to be — yet we can’t help but see something of ourselves in her selfishness and bad behavior. “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is obviously not for everybody. I know some folks who hated it so much they got up and walked out of last week’s IFFBoston Fall Focus screening. But there’s truth and honesty to be found in the film. And if you’re on the same wavelength as Bronstein’s macabre humor, the hamster scene is an instant classic.

“After the Hunt” and “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” open in theaters on Thursday, Oct. 16.