Kneecap review – Irish-language hip-hop trio in fiercely riotous Belfast romp

The Irish-language hip-hop trio Kneecap from Belfast caused much spluttering from the DUP in 2019 when, one day after William and Kate’s royal visit to the city’s Empire Music Hall, they showed up there doing a gig that involved raucously shouting (in English) “Brits out”. Kneecap have been a blazingly fierce presence since they emerged from the Irish language movement in the North, reinventing the political purpose of hip-hop and fighting a rearguard action for republican and Irish culture against a somnolent consensus.
Now they’re playing versions of themselves in this hyperactive, and slightly Guy-Ritchie-esque biopic that isn’t shy of stereotypes; it is directed by Rich Peppiatt, who made their last video. The film focuses on a key moment of consciousness-raising: they realised that, on being questioned by the “peelers”, an Irish-language speaker can demand to have an Irish-language translator, fundamentally changing the dynamic of any such police interrogation and potentially any relationship with the police and the state itself.
The three are Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvai; here they are shown as two guys discovered by a third, a music teacher. The film imagines a lost dad, an IRA man played by Michael Fassbender, who is supposed to have faked his own death and now lives somewhere else under an assumed identity, teaching yoga and surfing to hippy tourists: from Bobby Sands to Bobby Sandals, as one of the band wryly puts it. Though given that Fassbender did actually play Bobby Sands in 2008 in Steve McQueen’s film Hunger, seeing him like this is a bit of a comedown, like watching Marlon Brando in The Freshman, playing a guy who resembles Don Corleone.
The band chaotically and uproariously refuse to conform to ideological purity. One of them has a covert relationship with a woman from a unionist background – their differences are a kind of kink – and they’re involved in drugs, with the film claiming that anti-drug republican hard men are a bunch of bullies and hypocrites. As for where Kneecap get their drugs, the movie makes the tongue-in-cheek claim that supplies arrive almost by magic from the dark web. (Well, in real life it may be a bit more analogue than that, but this isn’t a documentary.)
The film really comes to life in the actual hip-hop scenes; the musical sequences have originality, comedy and freedom. The rest of the time, the film looks worryingly like a late 90s-early 00s cool Britannia geezer-gangster romp. I couldn’t help wondering if it couldn’t have been a full-on sung-through hip-hop musical because the music moments are so good. At all events, it’s a reminder that in Belfast music is – to quote Stiff Little Fingers – a suspect device.