Rowdy Irish rap biopic Kneecap can’t hang for the long haul

Speaking Irish is politicized, and a relative rarity. Rapping in Irish is even more rare, and even more political, especially in the North, where you’re as likely to run into a “You live here, speak English” conservative as at a Trump rally. So when the three knuckleheads of Kneecap tell unionist politicians to fuck off in the same breath as they wax ridiculous about popping molly, the politics and partying are connected—fused by a common tongue rebelling against stiff Brit imperialists. The most impressive thing about Kneecap, the quasi-biopic fictionalizing the Belfast trio’s formation, is how it draws implied parallels between the oppression facing Irish republicans and the systemic abuses that’ve long left Black musicians telling their listeners, in one form or another, to fight the power. But writer/director Rich Peppiatt’s film has a harder time connecting its stylish music video silliness with drama that meanders and a political message that repeats like it’s stuck on a cheap turntable.

This isn’t the fault of the tracksuited musicians—Mo Chara (AKA Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh), Móglaí Bap (AKA Naoise Ó Cairealláin), and the Irish flag balaclava-wearing DJ Próvaí (AKA JJ Ó Dochartaigh)—who play heightened versions of the themselves in the film. The former two are the hedonistic bad boys, the drug-dealing faces of the group. The latter beatmaster is a former Irish-language teacher. They link up after the film’s best scene, which involves cleverly erecting a language barrier between the Irish-speakers and the English-only cops. All three are perhaps better actors than rappers, smarmy and charismatic, and perhaps I only say that because when Kneecap takes a break to turn into a music video for one of their songs, it’s when it feels most generic.

We’ve seen plenty of lower-class U.K. rabblerousers getting by on talking big, cracking wise, and pounding Class A substances in the recent class comedies Get Duked! and Scrapper; the harder-edged subplots of John Carney movies observe similar characters using music as an outlet over in Ireland. Kneecap is raunchier and more pleased with itself, a good-vibes Trainspotting; it’s taking ketamine on the bus and breaking the fourth wall to fast-forward through sequences where the band members are getting their asses kicked by local paramilitants. Finally hearing a song from the film’s burgeoning performers should feel triumphant in the context of the defiant film, but when the club-ready, grime-adjacent tracks start, the anarchic tone ironically buttons up and settles down.

Kneecap kicks off with a bang and only whimpers from there, quickly slipping out of Peppiatt’s hands. A parade of lens changes, funny camera positions, comic book motion lines, and on-screen illustrations amp things up, but they peter out quickly—it’s a hard-partying movie that can’t hang for the long haul. Peppiatt’s mostly done nonfiction so far, breaking out with the tabloid doc One Rogue Reporter, and his bag of tricks is shallow. Kneecap is his first fiction feature, which he built up to by directing the group’s simplistic, confessional-set music video for “Guilty Conscience.”

Kneecap is a bit more flashy than that, but not much deeper once you get familiar with its barebones “Beastie Boys meets Bobby Sands” rhymes. Michael Fassbender, who played IRA martyr Sands in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, appears briefly in Kneecap’s bookends as Móglaí Bap’s IRA-affiliated dad—lending the indie film some A-list legitimacy, if not much else. He’s mostly just another stray thread dangling off the script, which juxtaposes Kneecap’s origins with the fight for Irish language recognition (not codified in the North until late 2022).

As Kneecap’s rowdy goons find political purpose through their music and vice versa—DJ Próvaí finally, secretly, reaches his students through Kneecap’s songs—Peppiatt must deal with all the narrative padding he’s added to extend the film to its 105 minutes. There’s the dead-end romance, which starts as a punchline about political-difference-as-kink and goes nowhere from there. There’s the shut-in mom, abandoned by her husband and her movement after Fassbender’s character fakes his death. There are the endless endings, where Kneecap refuses to stop explaining itself, even when it’s showing us a seemingly climactic concert. Kneecap needs to keep the tempo up if we’re going to stay with its mad lads, but it too often overindulges on plot and finds itself frozen, couchlocked.

Some of the film’s on-the-nose—at times literally direct-to-camera—explanation of its themes are there for a global audience, willingly distant and ignorant to as much geopolitics as possible. Some is standard cinematic condescension, where any faith in your viewer is faith misplaced. It all undermines the cleverness and confidence of the performers; if they wanted to be run-of-the-mill, PSA-delivering youth activists, they wouldn’t be rapping goofy-angry lines like, “A dog with a job, what the fuck is that? / When our poor Micky’s just sittin’ in the flat.”

At least Kneecap walks the walk. The charming skangers joined a pro-Palestine protest at Sundance, where Kneecap made its debut, and pulled their appearance from SXSW after it became widely publicized that the U.S. Army was a main sponsor of the fest. The band’s got balls, and principles. Their movie shows the limitations of both.

Director: Rich Peppiatt
Writer: Rich Peppiatt
Starring: Naoise Ó Cairealláin, Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh, JJ Ó Dochartaigh, Josie Walker, Fionnula Flaherty, Jessica Reynolds, Adam Best, Simone Kirby, Michael Fassbender
Release Date: August 2, 2024

[Correction: a previous version of this story grouped John Carney’s Irish films with those in the U.K.]