In the foreground of Kneecap, there is the story of some musical underdogs, who band together to form the hip-hop group of the title. This story is told with a sense of relative familiarity, as the three men in the group face down some tough odds in getting their music heard by the wider world, before meeting with success in their live performances. The members of the trio, by the way, play versions of themselves here in a version of the story of their formation, which is certainly an act of confidence on the part of writer/director Rich Peppiatt. This gamble could have struck out for the filmmaker, although perhaps the idea of casting actors to play the roles wouldn’t have been practical anyway.
In the background of Peppiatt’s film is a tale of the political variety, set in Ireland just before the pandemic and approximately 20 years after the “end” of that tumultuous period known as the Troubles. If the members of a group like Kneecap, at least one of whom has a direct line to the Irish Republican Army, can ever find success in the music world, surely it would have to be under the heat of such political ties – at least, one would have to believe that’s the case when there is the possibility of arrest and the much higher probability of angering the wrong people in leadership or law enforcement. That kind of politics charges this movie with something deeper at work than a simple story of musical underdogs. It also makes quite sure that we sympathize with these three men.
The younger pair of the three are Naoise Ó Cairealláin, the son of a presumed-dead IRA operative, and Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh, who has been Naoise’s best friend since childhood. At the film’s start, the two are already working on rhyme schemes either aimed at the heart of the social politics of the day or simply wishing to tear down the taboo of sexual and drug-related content that angers those predisposed to be offended by all of it anyway. A crucial element of their lyrics is that it is written in the Irish language at a time when there must be legislation introduced and passed to make it permissible in official settings. That draws the ire of a local detective (Josie Walker), who is sympathetic to the cause of the other side in that argument, and the interest of JJ Ó Dochartaigh, a translator hired for Liam.
In secret, and away from the prying eyes of the police department and his girlfriend Caitlin (Fionnuala Flaherty), JJ sets the lyrics to a hip-hop beat and, eventually, joins in on Naoise and Liam’s underground act, which eventually takes on the name Kneecap. The name, by the way, even has its roots in the IRA, given that that’s the bone in the body targeted by the army’s members as a most cruel form of punishment. Such a name being so flippantly used should give us an idea of how these three tackle the world around them. That, of course, should also be clear by virtue of the lyrics in their songs.
In another instance of the film’s vibrancy and sense of style, we get little animations telling us what their Irish lyrics mean in English (and the group do eventually, because of the demands of commerce, embrace the latter to some degree – but not too much). Those lyrics are occasionally head-splitting in the profanity department, contributing potentially hundreds of uses of a pair of particularly colorful four-letter words to the vocabulary of all who listen, and it’s a delight to come across a movie so thoroughly honest about its subjects in this way. Any whiff of editing their music for our benefit would have been dishonest. We can be thankful that Peppiatt did not approach things from an angle of bland safety.
The political story in the background materializes in the form of some storytelling moves that are safer than others. JJ’s girlfriend is on television, for instance, actively working toward the goal of legalizing the Irish language, all while her boyfriend, clad in a balaclava, is baring his buttocks at shows and endangering the caution of that work. Naoise meets Georgia (Jessica Reynolds) and falls quickly into a relationship built on the physical, which is endangered by their opposing beliefs (and leads to something of a minor but clever twist). A group of anti-drug activists, who gather to fight the perceived corruption of the youth, eventually reveal another, hollower side.
These are ways of putting the political into a literal, easy-to-swallow context, although at least Peppiatt is confident enough in the foregrounded story even to indulge in one that wishes to act as a bit of broad, hardly subtle commentary. A better and clearer angle develops even deeper into the background, after all, as we discover what happened to Naoise’s infamous father, played by Michael Fassbender as something of a ghost that haunts the proceedings. These scenes, which demonstrate the film’s solid backbone, are no subtler, although they touch upon an even riskier sense of the polemical nature of this story. Kneecap surprises in the ways it genuinely confronts these ideas, while also weaving quite a yarn of its own.
Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
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