KNEECAP (2024) is a feel good Irish comedy, it’s rowdy and rebellious but in a totally lovable way. It’s not that far from what we used to call a “this year’s THE FULL MONTY!,” I don’t think, except there’s lots of casual cocaine and MDMA use without consequences. But it’s pretty great. It’s just such a winning subject, it’s hard not to have a great time.
I admit I never heard of them before I heard about the movie, but Kneecap are an Irish rap trio. Since the movie they’ve gotten into trouble for supporting Palestine. They condemned the genocide on stage at Coachella, so various pro-Israel groups and politicians went after them, accused them of supporting terrorism, one member even got charged (later dropped by missing a filing deadline). In a rock ’n roll biopic there’s always the part where the most uptight losers imaginable are trying to ratfuck our hero over some ridiculous moral scare bullshit they concocted, and it’s always a period piece so we look back and think wow, it’s crazy that people used to be like that back then, jesus christ. Just ‘cause he wiggled his hips? Here you get to see it in real time. Instant rock ’n roll cred for Kneecap there.
That’s all I really knew, but the KNEECAP movie is a fun fictionalized telling of the group’s origins and rise to fame, kinda like STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON for N.W.A, but with a very different tone and scope fitting the setting of late 2010s West Belfast.
Liam and Naoise are a couple of mischievous fuckups, guys who wear track suits, go to raves, sell drugs, get high, run from “peelers,” as they call cops. One day Liam gets arrested and interrogated and refuses to speak anything but Irish. JJ, a teacher at an Irish immersion school, gets called in as an interpreter. He doesn’t want to do it, but his partner Caitlin (Fionnuala Flaherty), a budding activist in the Irish language movement, insists that “There’s an Irish speaker in need” who might be “taking a principled stand for their language rights.” So JJ goes and helps Liam outsmart Detective Ellis (Josie Walker, BELFAST) as well as hide a notebook that might contain incriminating scrawlings. It definitely contains a sheet of acid tabs.
Later JJ flips through the notebook and finds rhymes written in Irish that he thinks are really funny and interesting. He goes to his garage, where he has a DJ deck and samplers and stuff. The guy is on the dorky side, kinda reminds me of Tony Hale. He’s a music teacher, for crying out loud. But here we see he has at least past attempts at being a DJ or hip hop producer. So he starts making beats and imagining these rhymes over them.
There’s a bit of a HUSTLE & FLOW feel to this. These talented but regular people stumbling into an opportunity to team up and do something creatively fulfilling, even revolutionary. Liam and Naoise at first scoff at the idea of rapping in Irish, because who would listen to it? This movie does such a good job of succinctly explaining an issue I hadn’t been exposed to – the idea of maintaining the indigenous Irish language as part of their cultural identity, and of the colonizers trying to stop them for the same reason. The boys know that’s important and JJ convinces them they can do it with hip hop. After all, Naoise’s dad used to tell them “Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom.”
See, his dad Arló (Michael Fassbender, BLACK BAG) instilled in him an outlaw spirit and Irish pride. Also he blew up cars and had to fake his death and go into hiding. So Naoise is actually pretty sick of hearing about the fuckin Troubles from before his time and sees how his dad’s legendary heroic act of disappearing is also a fancy way of being a deadbeat dad and husband. His mom, Dolores (Simone Kirby, SEASON OF THE WITCH), was so broken by the abandonment that she won’t even leave the house. Naoise does know where his dad is hiding out, though, and goes to visit him in one scene. He’s mad that his dad won’t speak Irish to him, and his dad is mad that he has a joint in the car.
“Ma’s getting worse,” Naoise says. “She was asking about you.”
“No she wasn’t.”
“No. She wasn’t.”
I thought about that scene later when I decided to look up if these actors had been in anything else and wait a minute, holy shit, this is the real Kneecap playing themselves? This is a guy who’s never even thought about acting before this and he does this great of a scene with Michael Fassbender? But actually I was more shocked by JJ being the real guy. I say this in a completely neutral way – it just seems like the actor you would get to play that character if it was fiction! “What if a school music teacher fell into forming a hardcore rap group?” That’s what happened, plus “and then starring as himself in a movie about it.” Wow. I had no idea.
There’s an underdog story here – they go from impressing a couple old Irish guys at a pub by rapping in their native language to getting almost played on the radio but banned, which brings them notoriety and eventually they’re playing big shows. JJ deals with having a secret life hidden from Caitlin and from his employers (the reason, at least in the movie, for wearing a balaclava, which became their symbol). Naoise deals with his problems with his parents. Liam has a Romeo and Juliet casual sex relationship with a girl named Georgia (Jessica Reynolds, THE CURSE OF AUDREY EARNSHAW), who gets off on his bad boy persona and habit of yelling “our day will come!” in Irish when he climaxes. Obviously there is plenty of cultural context that I’m having to guess at, but some of these jokes communicate the odd situation this generation is in, feeling the reverberations of the Troubles but also at a distance enough to joke about them, or turn them into a fetish.
There’s a rock ’n roll / punk rock / fuck you I won’t do what you tell me spirit to this thing that’s infectious. They mostly fight against the British-sympathizing authority figures who try to make them speak English, but they also clash with Arló’s old buddies who judge their hedonistic lifestyle and music (and then turn out to be hypocrites).
I don’t have strong opinions about the music. It sounds great in the movie. I like that it’s kind of like License to Ill era rowdiness but with a political edge. I like that they lose JJ’s studio so he goes to the school and digs out an old TR-808. It’s like in action movie when they have to resort to an old stash of weapons from ‘Nam or whatever. I like that they recognize parallels between the American Black culture that created the music and their own situation under colonialism, paying homage but making it personal to their own lives. I can’t fully appreciate hip hop in a language I don’t speak, but I think it’s so beautiful to see these traditions reaching around the world and finding a context where every word of a rhyme is even more powerful than usual. Because they’re bullets! Miuzi weighs a ton.
KNEECAP’s writer/director Rich Peppiatt is a former journalist. In 2011 he resigned from The Daily Star in a long letter to their owner accusing them of anti-Muslim propaganda. He turned the experience into a one man show and a documentary, then started directing short films and television. KNEECAP is his first narrative feature.
If I would’ve guessed, though, I’d have thought he was a music video director, because he enjoys visual gimmicks like animating text and motion lines over live action, cutting to claymation during a drug trip, shooting from inside a slot machine, or inside a nostril snorting coke. It’s not full-on Michel Gondry or Tsui Hark style – these things are used pretty sparingly – but there’s enough to add some chaotic energy appropriate to the subject matter.
Peppiatt told an outlet called Zavvi that he put together the screen story during the “longest, most drunken interview imaginable” with the trio and filled the script with their “insane anecdotes.” Maybe more of it is true than I assumed? “I’d say 70% of the movie is true,” he claims. “I can say though, that the maddest stuff in here really did take place.”
Most of the career and controversy parts are real, like their song being banned, and JJ getting fired from his teaching job after showing his ass (with “BRITS OUT” painted on it) on stage. I read that the refusing to speak English at the police station thing was inspired by a real incident, but it was Liam’s friend that did it. That wasn’t how he met JJ. Naoise’s father was a prominent activist but not, from what I can tell, a bomber who faked his death. I’m betting the opening where a police helicopter shines a spotlight on him and baby Naoise as he’s being baptized in the forest is either movie fiction or family tall tale, but it doesn’t really matter to me. It’s good shit. It’s great shit.
The artistic license doesn’t feel misleading to me, it feels like it’s all in good mythmaking fun. Even if you subtract the parts that seem made up, this is a really entertaining and inspiring story. And it’s just so impressive that Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh (a.k.a. Mo Chara), Naoise Ó Cairealláin (a.k.a. Móglaí Bap) and JJ Ó Dochartaigh (a.k.a. DJ Próvaí) are so natural and so funny starring in a movie. No offense to the Fat Boys but in my opinion this is way, way better than DISORDERLIES.
