Sort of a musical biopic and sort of a piss-take on musical biopics, Rich Peppiatt’s movie about the titular Irish-language rap group messes with the audience’s expectations as he fashions a comedy of ill manners to make a point about how rebelliousness breeds contempt in the right foes. Michael Fassbender makes a clever cameo as Arlo, an IRA member who learned Irish Gaelic during a prison sentence and whose son, Naoise, is one of the rappers in Kneecap, a group that has, since this movie’s initial release, continued to piss people off in new ways, most lately by supporting the Palestinian cause. In the movie, Naoise (or Moglai Bap) and his partner, Liam (or Mo Chara), rebel in a more conventional way, by dealing drugs, chiefly ketamine, and when the British police of Belfast arrest Naoise he refuses to speak English, so the cops, or “peelers,” as the nominally Catholic youth call them, have to hire a translator. In this case, that’s JJ (or DJ Provai), a school teacher as square as a milk carton. Eventually, JJ is shown how his own advocacy of the Irish language makes him a natural enemy of the unionists and the Brits and when he discovers a cache of rap lyrics, in Irish, penned by the two troublemakers, he encourages them to put them to music. As it happens, he’s a recording engineer hobbyist and ends up becoming the duo’s baclava-sporting DJ. Kneecapping, a form of brutal punishment made infamous by the IRA, is what they decide to call themselves, thus taking the piss in an altogether novel way.

Most of the movie plays out like a Guy Ritchie crime actioner, a decision that Peppiatt knows is more effective in putting across the group’s themes than a political diatribe would. Moreover, Kneecap’s own antics are hardly models of uprightness. Their drug use is extreme, their criminal activities wanton, and their sexual adventures somewhat debasing for all involved, but in the end they work to place the group in a tradition of righteous hooliganism against an oppressive establishment, though it’s a tradition that Arlo may not approve of with his older definition of rebelliousness. In fact, Kneecap, once they start to garner a fan base, find their real enemy is not the British police but rather an organization called Radical Republicans Against Drugs, a neat summation of the my-way-or-the-highway extremism of classical IRA sentiment. Then there’s Liam’s affair with a Protestant girl from a good family, Georgia (Jessica Reynolds), who gets off sexually on the frisson created by the conflict between their respective cultures, whether political or aesthetic. 

Kneecap the movie is more interested in entertainment than in edification, so I imagine most of the biographical elements are bullshit. And yet as an advertisement for the trio’s own music and artistic attitude it works exceedingly well by arbitrating for Irish pride without making it seem like something to be proud of. The movie takes it for granted that British imperialism is bad, and if you don’t agree, well they’ve got plenty of epithets for you that you will never understand. 

In English and Irish Gaelic. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Kneecap home page in Japanese

photo (c) Kneecap Films Limited, Screen Market Research Limited t/a Wildcard and The British Film Institute 2024