Producers: Trevor Birney and Jack Tarling   Director: Rich Peppiatt   Screenplay: Rich Peppiatt   Cast: Naoise Ó Cairealláin (aka Móglaí Bap), Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh (aka Mo Chara), JJ Ó Dochartaigh (aka DJ Provaí), Josie Walker, Fionnuala Flaherty, Jessica Reynolds, Adam Best, Simone Kirby and Michael Fassbender   Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

Grade: B

The energy is propulsive and the style endlessly extravagant in Rich Peppiatt’s liberally fictionalized musical biography of the eponymous Belfast-based band, a rap trio who deliver their numbers in Ulster Irish; Peppiatt, cinematographer Ryan Kernaghan and editors Chris Gill and Julian Ulrichs are in full Danny Boyle “Trainspotting” mode, using offbeat camera angles, hyperkinetic editing, animation and even Claymation segments, as well as overlapping barrages of dialogue and music and a smattering of archival footage, to fashion, in between the quieter expository episodes, a hectic, sometimes oppressive din of sound and action.     

But the style has a larger purpose.  As the movie presents their story, Kneecap’s provocative popularity contributed to the movement to recognize Irish as an official language in British-ruled Northern Ireland, a status that Parliament finally granted in 2022.  So it gives a broader political dimension to the band’s musical rebelliousness; though the Troubles, so called, are officially over, Catholic and Protestant groups are still active, their violent ways of dealing with opponents and traitors reflected in the name the trio adopts.  The decorous, demonstration-based approach to the language campaign championed by activists like Caitlin (Fionnuala Flaherty) finds a more raucous alternative in Kneecap’s angry, obscenity-laden performances, which amount to a howl of rage against the legacy of English colonialism in Ireland that continued after the Good Friday Accords, a rage-filled protest against what was perceived as the persistent denial of full sovereignty and cultural identity.  The anarchic spirit that pervades the film is an artistic analogue to the band’s radical message and their no-holds-barred delivery of it.       

The narrative begins in 2017 in the Gaeltacht Quarter of West Belfast, where best friends Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh and Naoise Ó Cairealláin, playing themselves, are a rambunctious anti-establishment pair, antagonizing the British authorities on the one hand and Republican gangs on the other with the drug-running scams they’ve been involved with since, as a prologue shows, they were cherubic altar boys.  Now they secure product on the web or acquire it by telling sob stories about their upbringing to gullible doctors.

Both also have private issues that make for trouble.  Womanizer Liam is in a very, very active sexual relationship with Georgia (Jessica Reynolds), an ultra-randy Protestant girl whose mother Ellis (Josie Walker), a ruthless policewoman, will resort to almost anything to break them up once she finds them together.  Naoise is the son of an IRA legend, Arló (Michael Fassbender), who was a champion of the Irish language and faked his own death a decade earlier.  (The prologue also shows how Naoise’s baptism was interrupted by a British security raid.)  Now Arló’s teaching yoga on the coast; Naoise periodically meets with the cool but demanding fellow secretly while dealing with the emotional toll of his father’s absence on his devastated mother Dolores (Simone Kirby).

When Liam is arrested by Ellis and feigns not being able to understand English, she commandeers music and language teacher JJ Ó Dochartaigh, also playing himself, to act as an interpreter.  He reads the young man’s Irish rhymes in his seized notebook and has the idea of adding a synthesized beat to them. Eventually he persuades Liam and Naoise that he’s not a narc and prods them to record under the pseudonyms “Mo Chara” and “Móglaí Bap,” joining them as their colleague “DJ Próvaí” and disguising himself in an Irish tricolored balaclava to protect his identity while the younger guys wear their trademark tracksuits.  Kneecap is born, and quickly takes off to the distress of the British authorities like Ellis, who consider them subversive, and more sedate activists like Caitlin, who just happens to be JJ’s wife.

The rest is history, or what passes for it here.  The movie seems about as accurate a musical biography as most Hollywood examples of the genre have been; it takes liberties for dramatic effect, including the public reemergence of Arló at a crucial climactic moment.

But complaining about the specifics of the narrative is rather beyond the point.  More important is the unabashed political stance it stakes out.  This is not intended as a nuanced, objective view of the various groups that clash in Northern Ireland (as Georgia calls it) or, as Liam responds during one of their frenzied sessions in bed, the North of Ireland; it’s a tale of heroes and villains, pure and simple, and the combination of humor, heavy drama and stylistic pizzazz with which it depicts them is fearless, if unsubtle; when Caitlin complains early on about JJ making a joke about the Potato Famine, his rejoinder is cutting proof that nothing, distant or recent, is exempt from the screenplay’s satirical blade.

Even if rap, Irish or otherwise, is not your music of choice, you have to admire the film’s audacity in combining booze, drugs, debauchery, rap and cinematic flamboyance with biting comedy, harsh drama and a potent message about political and cultural freedom, as well as Peppiatt’s success in drawing from his three stars, non-actors all, performances that aren’t stiff and self-conscious, as well as skillful work from the supporting cast.  You also have to appreciate the skill of the technical crew—not just Kernaghan, Gill and Ulrichs but production designer Nicola Moroney and costumer Zjena Glamocanin–for collaborating to create such a vivid, evocative milieu.  Needless to say, the music by Kneecap and Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante is an essential element in the package.

Both brutally funny and deadly serious, “Kneecap” is a riotous, wildly over-the-top but dramatically trenchant tale of life and culture in a still-divided modern Belfast.