Kneecap review
Director: Rich Peppiatt
Writer: Rich Peppiatt
Stars: Naoise Ó Cairealláin, Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh, JJ Ó Dochartaigh, and Michael Fassbender
Running Time: 105 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below
As someone from Northern Ireland (ahem, North of Ireland), I couldn’t help but smile broadly at Kneecap’s opening jest – “Every fuckin’ story about Belfast starts like this…” followed by the customary 1970s stock footage of exploding car bombs, rubble strewn streets, and deafening rifle fire. “But not this one,” says the voice over. It’s an elbow jab to the audience, an acknowledgement of the common representational pitfalls of making a movie about the north, each pitfall a depressing decent into political anger and decades of sectarian violence. The irony, of course, is Kneecap is also another one of those movies.
And yet foremost Kneecap is a comedy. With its mischievous voice over, its smash cuts, its copious use of cocaine and ketamine, it’s a punkish musical biopic laced with the hedonism of being young, male, and continuously high. It’s also about rap music’s ability to synthesize generational anger and give young people an expansive voice in an era of stagnation and economic disparity. But it’s mostly about men getting pissed and laid.
It’s undeniable Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996) is a major influence. Kneecap’s attempting to do to Belfast what Trainspotting did to Edinburgh. The film itself moves at the pace of a chemically enhanced thinker, taking us to the bouncing parties of West Belfast, and the lowly, gleefully blasphemous upbringing of best friends Naoise (pronouced Nisha) and Liam. Early they proclaim drugs where “our fuckin’ callin’.” Naoise’s republican father teaches them the ways of hating the British – “I want you to go home tonight and watch an American Western, but look at it from the Indian’s point of view.”
Indeed, Kneecap are a real rap group from West Belfast and each of its three members play themselves in this loose biopic. Director Rich Peppiatt claimed it’s about 70% percent accurate to Kneecap’s real story, but which 70% he won’t say. They rap mostly in Irish as a political statement, invecting the linguistic oppression of the British invasion, and lyrically they provide plenty of references to the RUC and balaclavas, alongside much sippin’ of cans and smokin’ of rollies.
The film’s emotional heart belongs to third member JJ Ó Dochartaigh, a thirty-something teacher working at an Irish-language school, who by happenstance absconds with the lyric book of one of his future band-members. He becomes impressed with the verbal stylings and decides to dust off that old DJ equipment lying in storage. The result is a collision of raucous talent. In an early scene in their studio/garage, the three band-members take drugs, bop their heads to beats, and rap viciously into a microphone as they create their first track in a binge of junk creativity. The editing, the music, the performances all chemically enhanced to avoid biopic boredom at all costs. As notoriety comes, so do the consequences of their message – the systems of police and paramilitaries provide the villains.
Peppiatt’s screenplay deftly balances the punk colored rebellion and ever so slight interpersonal drama. Unlike Trainspotting, copious drug use and binge drinking ultimately comes to no consequence to our heroes. They slide between the axis of trouble unabated in their mission to perform. Internally there are not even any major character arcs for the band. They stay beholden to their internal sense of self from the outset, which normally would be a major problem, but the trouble with so many musical biopics is that their character arcs are so mundanely similar. There’s only so many episodes of VH1’s Behind the Music you can watch before you realise the formula of Innocent – Famous – Downfall – Redemption is painfully repeated ad nauseum. It’s a dangerous recipe for mediocrity. Which strangely is why Kneecap’s refusal to provide the band with strong character arcs is refreshing. It’s the world around Kneecap that needs to change.
Unfortunately this does come at the expense of depth. As the band narrowly avoid an encroaching police detective and an anti-drug paramilitary group, they remain steadfastly rebellious, calling out the contradictions of politics and religion as they sweep through Belfast’s grey streets. As the binge drinking and heavy drug use continues unabated, I couldn’t help but feel a little like the fun-police in thinking there had to be more to the story. Is it bad to think such uninhibited lifestyles couldn’t be judged as completely harmless, even in the face of a politically compelling ideal? And yet I know that to spoil the party would be to spoil the film, for Kneecap’s goal is to keep the music playing, keep the high going, and never leave you too long in silence to contemplate your choices.
This is a musical biopic of what happens before the cliched downfall, the story of accumulating fame and peaking dopamine that never sees the crest of a downward slope. It’s a male fantasy of angry minded music pitched to a politically hungry crowd, all of it chemically lensed for extra pleasure. The party is fun to indulge in, and maybe that’s good enough for now.
