Kneecap review – energised Irish pride

Turn off your English loyalty and turn on the bassline for the semi-fictionalised origin story of Northern Irish hip-hop band Kneecap. Each member of the trio plays themselves and the righteous vitality that animates their music translates into intoxicating screen presences high on the dirty freedoms (and drugs) of the post-colonial grassroots. From the opening, the film crackles with the possibilities – and lack of them – of being born after the 1998 Good Friday agreement, at a flimsy remove from the factional violence of The Troubles yet with blood pumped full of ire at the still-unaddressed horrors carried out by the British: follow the trail of many unsolved murders – including of minors – and you will find British Army supplied weapons. Kneecap doesn’t tell you any of this. The exposition found in the likes of Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast represents a pandering to ignorance that this film avoids. Touchpaper-recent history is boiled into the nothing-to-lose, dry-witted eloquence of its subjects and their appetite for drug-taking and rebellion.

Twenty-something Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh (who raps as Mo Chara) and his best friend Naoise (aka Móglaí Bap) have been instilled with the value of the Irish language since childhood. “Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom,” Naoise is told by his IRA militant father Arló (Michael Fassbender) shortly before he fakes his own death, leaving his wife in a housebound stupor for the next few decades. Nonetheless, the lesson sticks and in among taunting the Orange Order and taking industrial amounts of coke, the duo prioritise keeping Irish alive. This gives them common cause and places them in the six per cent of the population with local music teacher JJ Ó Dochartaigh who crosses their path one fateful night at the police station. One thing leads to another and soon, by day, Dochartaigh teaches unenthused youths percussion and by night is baring his ass-cheeks as the balaclava-clad DJ Próvaí.

English (?!) director Rich Peppiatt folds boisterous animations and plot strands galore (Arló’s fugitive life, DJ Próvaí’s double one, Liam’s sexual relationship with a cop’s niece, their rivalry with an anti-drug gang) into Kneecap’s irresistible rise to fame. Holding everything together is a wry political coherence, a loose but fierce conviction that working-class people with an attitude and talent can stand up and say something. Kneecap made headlines in 2023 when they pulled out of SXSW, protesting the festival’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Palestine. The presence of a flag and a keffiyeh serve as a nod from one spiritual twin to another from the other side of colonial shackles.

The humour is merciless. “Too soon?” asks one character after his girlfriend says he shouldn’t joke about the potato famine. Often, politics is presented as a dirge of bloodless talking points by suited power-brokers determined to make the silly little matter of who controls who seem like a rarefied business for elites. How enervating, then, to step into a world where political acuity and debauched life-force synthesise, as language blazes a path to freedom and the only things more suspect than a rogue bag of ketamine are law and order.