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.