Film Review: Irish language, nationalism collide in hip hop biopic ‘Kneecap’

If you haven’t yet heard of Kneecap – a hip hop group out of West Belfast whose members rap in a mixture of English and Irish – you’re not alone. If you think that hip hop and the Irish language don’t seem like they necessarily go together, you’re also not alone.

In an early scene in a new film about the group, also called “Kneecap,” J.J Ó Dochartaigh (stage name DJ Próvaí) approaches his future bandmates Naoise Ó Cairealláin (Móglaí Bap) and Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh (Mo Chara) about forming a music group. Naoise scoffs at JJ, dismissing the idea by saying that people don’t care about Irish hip hop when it’s in English, much less when it’s Irish. JJ’s response is simple. “Give them a reason to.”

And maybe the world is ready now. “Kneecap,” which follows the creation of the group and stars its three members as themselves, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, the first Irish language film to do so – and ever since I watched it earlier this week, I’ve been listening to their song “Cearta” (Irish for “Rights”) on repeat.

The movie – a fictionalized version of the group’s creation, directed and written by Rich Peppiatt – is just as outspoken, raucous and playful as the group’s music. It’s a biopic, but one that smartly hinges on the importance of language – and for hip hop, what could be more crucial than words? In the film, the rise of the group coincides with the Irish Language Act and the fight to officially put the Irish language on the same level of importance as English. Kneecap represents an important cog in that movement, rapping in Irish for a younger audience with songs that are full of as many references to drugs as they are to Irish republicanism. But in the film, Kneecap also represents a schism between old and new. Protest, and anti-British sentiment in particular, are nothing new to Northern Ireland (or, as nationalists might say, the North of Ireland). But what “Kneecap” really hammers home is the tension between traditional and progressive ways of getting your point across.

Before the formation of the group, Naoise, Liam and JJ were no strangers to Irish republicanism. JJ teaches Irish and his girlfriend Caitlin (Fionnula Flaherty) is an Irish-language rights activist. Naoise’s father Arlo (Michael Fassbender) is an IRA-militant who, after a series of car bombings (shown to us in a cheery montage), faked his own death to outwit the police – a decision that has left quite the rift between Arlo and his wife and son. Naoise and Liam are keenly anti-establishment of any kind, as taken with drugs and partying as they are Irish freedom itself. After Liam is arrested at a rave, he refuses to speak English to the cops (or the “peelers,” if you will). Enter JJ, who comes in as an Irish translator and strikes up a friendship with the younger man, eventually leading to the creation of Kneecap.

The movie that “Kneecap” most emulates is Danny Boyle’s “Trainspotting,” not so much in its story as in its construction and style. Every scene seems to explode forth from the next, moving swiftly without a real sense of decorum or care. Despite its quite dark subject matter at times, there’s always a sense of freedom and energy in the way the film unfolds. The only time that film feels even slightly separated is when the action breaks for a song. Those performances, while entertaining and particularly well staged, feel more like elongated music videos than they do part of a larger narrative.

The propulsive nature of the film is borne out of a generational divide that the existence of Kneecap only emphasizes. “Every word spoken in the Irish language is a bullet fired for Irish freedom,” Arlo tells Liam and Naoise as young boys, but does he really mean it? He can’t see how his son’s rap career helps push the movement forward in any meaningful way, particularly when they spend as much time rapping about weed and MDMA as they do Irish freedom – something of great concern to groups like Radical Republicans Against Drugs (Kneecap’s name comes from the traditional punishment that paramilitary Irish republicans would inflict on drug dealers). In another scene, Caitlin – unaware that her boyfriend is part of the music group she dislikes so much – confronts Liam and Naoise about the ways she thinks they’re hurting the language movement, telling them they need to be more “politically sensitive” in order to help achieve their goals.

The sequence in the film that best captures this schism between people ultimately interested in the same goal comes when Liam and Naoise hit up a doctor’s office to get prescription drugs. They’re the generation that became “the moment after the moment” –  too young to remember the worst of the bombings, or everything that happened in The Troubles, but still living with the consequences and trauma everyday. The way Liam, Naoise and the rest of their generation deal with all of that is what heightens that generational divide. They’re both unabashedly into drugs, and they have no problem laughing at the world that surrounds them even when that world is absolute hell (“Troubles? I’ve got [expletive] troubles,” Naoise says). This seems to be part of what really puts the older generation off, this sense that something as small as music can’t be a real mode of protest, or of moving the dial.

But music can be a political movement all its own, a way to capture pain and suffering into a medium built to move and inspire. Yes, Kneecap might sing about drugs, or paint the words “Brits Out” on their buttcheeks and then moon the crowd. Yes, that might all seem silly. But when JJ witnesses a group of his students rapping along to a Kneecap song, far more interested in learning Irish than they ever had been before, you can see how it takes all kinds to make a difference.

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