Film review: Kneecap fully delivers on the hype in this unapologetic statement of intent
Kneecap fully delivers on the hype
Kneecap
★★★★★
Welcome to sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, Irish language-style.
Delivering their blistering raps as gaeilge, Kneecap are a hip-hop trio straight outta Belfast, where their irreverent, confrontational style has ruffled its fair share of feathers.
Not that they and their growing army of fans care: Kneecap (16s) was the first Irish-language film ever to screen at the Sundance Festival, where it won this year’s NEXT Audience award, and was this week announced as Ireland’s official submission for the International Feature Film category at the 2025 Oscars.
The film opens in suitably chaotic style, at a christening in a forest interrupted by a RUC helicopter, which sets the tone for a rockumentary like no other. Growing up in the wake of the Troubles, Naoise (Móglaí Bap) and Liam Óg (Mo Chara) are streetwise hoods who are far more interested in spliff (“Drugs were our calling,” Mo Chara tells us via voiceover) than sex and rock ‘n’ roll, but when Irish teacher JJ (DJ Próvai) stumbles across the boys rapping in Irish, he seizes on the opportunity to promote the Irish language through the medium of hip-hop.
In this, he’s pushing at an open door: Naoise’s father Arló (Michael Fassbender) is a celebrated Republican hero who insists on the vital importance of the Irish language as a revolutionary tool, and the fact that no one is entirely sure if Arló is dead or alive only adds to his mystique.
Written by Móglaí Bap, Mo Chara and Rich Peppiatt, with the latter also directing, Kneecap fully delivers on the hype. Loosely based on the group’s origins in 2017, when Mo Chara was arrested for spray-painting graffiti in support of the Irish Language Act, it’s a film that blends historical truth, surreal digressions and a blackly comic commentary on post-Troubles Northern Ireland.
‘Whatever you say,’ Seamus Heaney advised his readers, ‘say nothing,’ but Kneecap had likely bunked off school that day: the tracks that punctuate the narrative blast through social commentary, puerile humour and revolutionary politics as a matter of course.
That hip-hop and rap are, historically, forms employed by the marginalised is built into the subtext as Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvai – all playing themselves to an impressively high standard – trample mercilessly on preconceived notions of rap, the Irish language and what might be achieved by a synthesis of both.
The result is a scabrously funny and hugely entertaining film that reinvigorates the rockumentary as it delivers an unapologetic statement of Kneecap’s intent.
- Kneecap opens in Irish cinemas on Thursday
