Can a movie leave you with a comedown? If it’s as raucous and unruly as Kneecap, a nonstop blizzard of beats, bumps of white powder and punky defiance of the British and Belfast’s sectarian past, the answer’s a firm ‘yes’.
Not just inspired by real life, but played, brilliantly, by its own three real-life Irish hip-hoppers, this Gaelic rap origin story is a bit like 8 Mile stumbling, half-cut and high, down the Falls Road, or if Trainspotting spoke Gaelic.
The story follows three unfulfilled Belfasters with a few things to say – about the Brits, the slow death of their mother tongue and the joys of Class-As – on their journey to becoming the globally-renowned rap trio of the title in the late 2010s. There’s clubs-and-drugs-loving layabouts Naoise (aka ‘Móglaí Bap’) and Liam (‘Mo Chara’), Celtic-loving boyhood pals who piss off the police for larks, and their beat-crafting producer JJ (‘DJ Próvaí’). He’s an older, stuck-in-a-rut school teacher with the musical chops to make alchemy from all their pent-up energy and scribbled-down lyrics.
The tunes, from anti-Brit anthem ‘H.O.O.D’ to ‘Parful’, a club banger about the unifying power of getting extremely high with Protestants, offer out-of-it musical interludes as the gang try to juggle career progress with industrial quantities of ketamine.
Think 8 Mile stumbling, half-cut and high, down the Falls Road
Michael Fassbender lends star power as Móglaí’s dad, a one-time IRA inmate of the city’s notorious Maze prison who has faked his own death and now lives as yoga instructor – ‘Bobby Sandals’ pisstakes his son – by the seaside. His rep as a folk hero lingers, though, to the disgust of Móglaí’s mum Dolores (Simone Kirby), and Josie Walker’s dogged detective, who sees a route to track him down via his son.
What follows is a kind of Belfast ‘Bhoys n the Hood’, as cops, dim-witted provos and censorious radio stations try to shut the outfit down, while Móglaí Bap and Mo Chara plunder the dark web for more drugs. The three self-proclaimed ‘low life scum’ are soon going viral and experience a political awakening as they unleash their Gaelic bangers into the culture.
It’d be easy in a film as larky as Kneecap to let its political threads between past and present fray and snap in the flurry of self-aware jokes (the film kicks off with a montage of Troubles-era car bombings and riots, before shrugging off those cinematic clichés in a tone-setting needle-scratch). But the script, penned by writer-director Rich Peppiatt and his three stars, zeroes in on three relationships: between Móglaí Bap and his IRA dad, Mo Chara and his Protestant girlfriend (Jessica Reynolds), and DJ Próvaí and his partner (Fionnuala Flaherty), a campaigner for preserving the Gaelic language.
Through them, and beyond the jokiness, a poignant picture emerges of a young generation trying to shake off their city’s violent past, cling to the good bits and reconcile with each other. Kneecap’s solution to it all is simple: get really fucked up.
In US theaters Fri Aug 2, and UK and Ireland cinemas Aug 23.