KNEECAP - Mark Reviews Movies

Kneecap, Sony Pictures Classics

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 1, 2024

There's an infectious energy to Kneecap, a dramatized biography of the origins of the eponymous hip-hop group from Belfast. It's the story of three people who don't think becoming Irish rappers is a possibility and don't necessarily want to become activists, but everything somehow aligned to make both of those things true. Besides, what else were they supposed to do with lives that have been ignored and existences that have been inherently political since before any of them were born?

Writer/director Rich Peppiatt's film is set circa 2019, around 20 years after the official end of that period of violence in Northern Ireland (or, as the main characters here would call it, the North of Ireland) and beyond, known by the understatement "the Troubles." Outside of the region, most people likely imagine—if they even give it a thought—that an agreement between the factions of that sectarian strife was the end any conflict there. Here, we're reminded that four centuries of territorial, political, and religious dispute isn't going to simply go away over the course of a couple decades.

These three men, although of two different generations, were born into and lived some part of the lives through the Troubles, after all. Take one of the younger pair of men, whose life pretty much began with evidence that his very existence was seen as a potential threat by some. He's Naoise Ó Cairealláin, the son of a notorious Irish republican, and his baptism in the forest is interrupted by a police helicopter, certain it has discovered a secret meeting of the Irish Republican Army. That's not necessarily wrong, since Arló (Michael Fassbender), the father, and likely some in attendance are members of that paramilitary group at the time, but this event is a matter of tradition, not politics.

One of the more fascinating angles of Peppiatt's story, though, is how it perceives tradition as inherently political. In this case, it's the question of the Irish language, which has been banned for official use in Northern Ireland for almost 300 years during the story's setting. As such, it has become a dying language in Belfast and the rest of the country, but Naoise, his best friend since childhood Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh, and JJ Ó Dochartaigh still speak it regularly.

Arló, who faked his death some years ago for a secret mission that never seems to materialize, taught his son and the friend to do so growing up. JJ currently teaches the language at a local high school in West Belfast, where he primarily works as a music teacher.

The two pals and the teacher meet almost entirely by chance here, when JJ serves as a translator for Liam after he is arrested and refuses to speak English, and the language and music will unite them in an unexpected way. JJ helps his fellow Irish-speaker out by hiding a notebook from the cops, and in addition to some recreational drugs, the teacher discovers rap lyrics in the book—all of them in Irish. In the music studio that's also his garage, JJ makes some beats and backing tracks to go with the words, convincing the friends that rapping in the Irish language only seems impossible because no one else has done it. Why shouldn't the three of them be the first?

In the film, Ó Cairealláin, Óg Ó Hannaidh, and Ó Dochartaigh play versions of themselves, who, in the story and in real life, adopt the stage names, respectively, of Móglaí Bap, Mo Chara, and DJ Próvaí as the group Kneecap. One of them comes up with the trio's name on a whim, after a local bar agrees to let them perform, and as a darkly cheeky joke in reference to a common practice by the IRA during the times of the Troubles: shooting criminals in the knees or other limbs as punishment. The name turns out to be deviously appropriate, though, as the growing shock of the group's popularity takes the legs out from under some unsuspecting folks, who find the trio's music about drugs and anti-British sentiment worthy of outrage.

The basic structure of the story is basically the usual stuff of a rise-to-fame narrative. However, the novelty the group's methods, the intrinsically political nature of their music, and a grounded sense of the down-and-dirty, do-it-themselves nature of how they create the songs and achieve that success make the film feel somewhat unique.

The performances are authentic, beyond the fact that the three leads have their real-life experiences upon which to draw. In particular, Ó Dochartaigh stands out as an otherwise unassuming man, hiding his double life from his day job and his live-in girlfriend Caitlin (Fionnuala Flaherty), who's advocating the passage of a law that would allow the Irish language's usage in official settings.

The screenplay ignores the typical conflicts of a music biography. Instead, it finds the simmering political tensions just beneath the surface of contemporary Belfast—from a local detective (played by Joise Walker) who's suspicious that the self-proclaimed "low-life scum" have other things in mind, to Liam's semi-girlfriend Georgia (Jesica Reynolds) who's a loyalist getting a thrill out of his republican beliefs, to an anti-drug republican group that thinks the musicians are corrupting the youth and the message.

Under Peppiat's direction, the film is flashy, with animations highlighting certain moments and English translations of Kneecap's lyrics filling the screen, and vibrant. The pulse of Kneecap, though, isn't simply in its style and momentum, because it deals as much in ideas, contradictions, and the quieter—but still-ongoing—lower-case troubles of this place as it does the force of the music.

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