I can’t believe I have to write these words, but Walk Hard was supposed to kill off cliché-ridden musical biopics, not provide a model for them to imitate. Oh, but here we are 17 years later, and the likes of Elvis, One Love, and Back to Black are doing the same stuff, and not even giving us anything as funny as “Let’s Duet.” You could be forgiven for forgetting what a good musical biopic looks like, but it will be less forgivable if you miss Kneecap, the movie about the similarly named Irish rap group that stars the rappers as themselves and opens at some select North Texas multiplexes this week. This blistering, funny, and irreducibly Gaelic romp isn’t to be missed.
The story picks up in 2017, as Liam Óg “Mo Chara” Ó hAnnaidh and his mate Naoise “Móglaí Bap” Ó Cairealláin are dead-end Catholic kids in West Belfast, scraping a living by dealing drugs and other petty crime, and mostly speaking Irish so they can pretend that they can’t talk to the police. One day as they run away from the cops, their former music teacher JJ Ó Dochartaigh finds a notebook of Irish-language poetry that Liam left behind and starts putting beats underneath the rhymes.
He convinces Liam and Naoise to take up rap music as a career and joins them onstage, but since he’s much older and doesn’t want the authorities to know he’s with them, he dons a green, white, and orange balaclava and takes up the name DJ Próvaí. Because Northern Ireland is known for people shooting their enemies in the knees, the band call themselves Kneecap. When they’re not throwing Ecstasy to their listeners — which is one way to get a crowd on your side — the group raps about sex, drugs, and hating the British, which draws the ire of Prince William, the police, rival drug dealers, British-loving Protestant thugs, and Irish-language advocates who want respectability for the language.
I do like the fact that writer-director Rich Peppiatt (an English-born first-timer from the world of music videos who speaks no Irish himself) doesn’t water down the Irish references in his script. I mean, the name DJ Próvaí refers to the Provisional IRA. I’m sufficiently versed with the culture to recognize the references to Bobby Sands and the Old Firm derby, but newcomers might feel a bit overwhelmed. Hand-drawn subtitles render the Irish into English and sometimes vice versa, and the film has animated drawings over the filmed images and even an interlude in full claymation, which is perhaps a gimmick too far.
Good thing that the writing is solidly funny underneath all the bells and whistles. When a police detective (Josie Walker) goes to Naoise’s house and threatens to arrest him, his mother (Simone Kirby) asks politely: “How do you take your tea, in a cup or straight in the face?” Then there’s the sex scenes between Mo Chara and his hot Protestant girlfriend (Jessica Reynolds), who both get a weird charge out of yelling sectarian religious slurs at each other while they’re doing it. Ó Dochartaigh shows the most screen presence of the three rappers as a man who’s relieved to make hip-hop after spending all day hearing schoolkids make horrible sounds on cèilidh instruments. The storytelling style and grungy atmosphere may very well remind you of an Irish version of Trainspotting.
I’m reminded of the 1991 film The Commitments, where the bandleader gives a speech about why his musicians are covering Motown: “The Irish are the Blacks of Europe … So say it loud: I’m Black and I’m proud.” All over the world, people who feel the need to rage against the system (or just, y’know, like the sounds of hip-hop) have embraced this African-American invention as their own. They do have Black people in Ireland, and I’d be interested to hear what they make of what Kneecap does.
Still, much like the band it’s about, the movie succeeds by not taking itself too seriously. Naoise’s estranged father (Michael Fassbender) declares that speaking Irish is equivalent to firing guns at the occupiers, but Liam has a different take: “We’ve had too many bullets, metaphorical and literal, fired already. Maybe not firing bullets is the bullet. Ah, fook it.” I stand with Mo Chara, and I now have his new musical film to laugh with.
Kneecap
Starring Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, Naoise Ó Cairealláin, and JJ Ó Dochartaigh. Written and directed by Rich Peppiatt. Rated R.
