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Kneecap is so confident and single-minded in its telling of the semi-fictionalised origins of its titular west Belfast hip-hop trio, that it may make anyone who’s never heard of them feel like a bit of a loser. It’s a film that not only signals a major musical arrival, but ends up feeling a lot bigger than the conventional (and often confining) boundaries of the “music biopic”. Kneecap is the story of Belfast and of the “ceasefire generation” – the ones who were told that all is well, that they live in “the moment after the moment”, even when their nation’s traumas are still writ into their bones. It’s a story, too, crucially, about language deployed as an act of liberation and defiance.
“Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom,” Naoise Ó Cairealláin’s Irish paramilitary father Arlo (Michael Fassbender) tells him. He’s faked his death to evade the British authorities and now lives incognito as a yoga instructor, mockingly nicknamed “Bobby Sandals” by his son, after the leader of the 1981 hunger strike (also famously played by Fassbender in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, released in 2008).
That’s the fictional bit of Kneecap’s biography. A lot of what comes next is true – Ó Cairealláin, under the stage name “Móglaí Bap”, formed a group in 2017 with Liam Óg “Mo Chara” Ó Hannaidh and JJ “DJ Próvaí” Ó Dochartaigh. Ó Dochartaigh is a former schoolteacher who took to wearing a balaclava of the Irish tricolour to conceal his identity on stage, and did, as the film portrays, once drop his trousers to reveal the words “Brits out” written on each butt cheek. All band members play themselves.
And writer-director Rich Peppiatt has, without breaking a sweat, faithfully captured the trio’s hard-partying, righteously angry schtick. Kneecap opens with a joke about a young Naoise and Liam, as altar boys, sneaking weed into the priest’s thurible (the swinging metal container filled with incense) and doping the entire congregation. It’s followed by lots of onscreen doodles, a stop-motion ketamine haze, and a storyline about how Liam has a sexual kink for arguing with Protestant girls (namely, Jessica Reynolds’s Georgia) about whether it’s “Northern Ireland” or “North of Ireland”.
The fact they do all this while (largely) speaking Irish is the point. The trio were formed, and the film takes place, during a period of lengthy debate around the Irish Identity and Language Act. When finally passed in 2022, the act provided the language with official recognition and protection. JJ’s wife, Caitlin (Fionnuala Flaherty) is a campaigner, and is concerned over who should be its “best ambassadors”. An organisation called the “Radical Republicans Against Drugs” are less polite about their objections to Kneecap.
But who is this respectability even for, when the only way a language dies is when there’s no one left who speaks it? The film’s politics are clear-eyed, and embrace both the global and the intimate – from a shot of a Palestinian flag flying from an apartment block window, to the final title card noting that “an indigenous language dies every 40 days”, to a scene where Naoise tearfully begs his father to speak to him in Irish (Fassbender is a smart casting choice here, able to express decades worth of sorrow in a fairly contracted screen time).
Kneecap argues the difference between language as archival work and language as something radical and alive. And for any non-Irish speakers agitated by the need to read subtitles? Well, as they might say in Belfast, they can “f***k up”.
Dir: Rich Peppiatt. Starring: Naoise Ó Cairealláin, Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh, JJ Ó Dochartaigh, Josie Walker, Fionnuala Flaherty, Jessica Reynolds, Adam Best, Simone Kirby, Michael Fassbender. 18, 105 mins.
‘Kneecap’ is in cinemas from 23 August
