Kneecap, the exuberant, mostly-true romp which opens at the Coolidge and the Somerville this weekend, in some ways feels like a corrective to Back to Black, the dreadful Amy Winehouse biopic released earlier this year. Both films are superficially similar, telling as they do the stories of 21st-century musicians who rose to notoriety from working-class backgrounds in the British Isles (Winehouse in suburban London in the early 2000s, Kneecap in West Belfast in the late 2010s). But where the Winehouse film bears the sickly fingerprints of heirs and shareholders manipulating the image of an artist who is sadly no longer able to shape her own narrative, Kneecap was made with the full involvement of a group who is still very much with us– and where so many musical biopics have the soulless pallor of a wax museum, Kneecap is bursting with life.
For the unaware, Kneecap are a hip hop group based in Northern Ireland (or the North of Ireland, as they would surely correct me) notable for rapping almost exclusively in the Irish language. The film follows childhood friends Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh (aka Mo Chara) and Naoise Ó Cairealláin (aka Móglaí Bap), a pair of radical hooligans who spend their time evading the police, committing acts of petty anarchy, and writing and recording rudimentary hip hop tracks. The pair find an unlikely collaborator in JJ Ó Dochartaigh, an unassuming music teacher at an Irish-language elementary school with a facility for beats and a drive to get his language recognized by the UK government; to protect his identity and employment, Ó Dochartaigh takes to performing in a balaclava under the pseudonym DJ Próvaí. As videos of the group’s performances spread on social media, Kneecap draws the attention of both the authorities and rival gangs, and they soon find themselves the unlikely faces (or masks) of a movement to preserve an indigenous language.
Like most conventional musical biopics, Kneecap has, to some extent, been polished and brightened into a piece of crowd-pleasing entertainment; there are action sequences and romantic subplots which seem, if not invented, then at least embellished and heightened for dramatic effect. But there is a wild energy and sense of genuine subversion to the film which is rare in a film so slickly produced. It is rare, for example, to see a mainstream film in 2024 so unambiguously and proudly anti-cop and anti-colonizer (not for nothing does one of the lads have a Palestinian flag hanging from his apartment balcony). Likewise, it does not hedge on its characters’ gleeful fondness for casual sex and illegal drugs; apart from the cops, the chief antagonists are a buffoonish but brutal squad of “Radical Republicans Against Drugs” trying to interfere with the group’s side-hustle peddling MDMA. Though the film is set less than a decade ago, it hearkens back to the scrappy, hysterical indie thrillers of the ‘90s– think Danny Boyle or Guy Ritchie before they got rich and boring.
Like Sing Sing, which also opens this weekend, Kneecap casts its subjects in starring roles, the members of Kneecap playing themselves even less fictionalized than the cast of that film. With their identical haircuts, accents, and personalities, Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap are a bit interchangeable– I couldn’t tell you which one had the English girlfriend and which had the da’ in the IRA if you held a gun to my head– but together they take on a sort of Chip-and-Dale charm as they outfox the squares trying to keep them down. Ó Dochartaigh, on the other hand, is such a natural that I could have sworn I’d previously seen him in half a dozen BBC cozy mysteries. None of them are likely to win an Oscar anytime soon, but neither do they clank through their dialogue the way so many musicians-turned-actors do, and they hold their own against such professional ringers as Michael Fassbender and Simone Kirby. Their presence is not a distraction; on the contrary, it’s hard to imagine this film possessing the spark that it does without them.
That spark is the other thing which sets Kneecap apart from the rest of its genre. In most biopics, the interest comes from one’s familiarity with the subject rather than anything intrinsically interesting about the story itself; as much fun as something like Rocketman is, we’re only really invested in the story because it happens to be about a massively beloved pop icon. On the flipside, though American audiences might not be familiar with Kneecap’s music, their story is wild enough that it would stand well enough on its own even if it were pure fiction. Kneecap isn’t exactly Pussy Riot in terms of political activism, but they’re a damn slight closer than most pop acts currently working, and even if one has no preexisting fondness for their music or knowledge of the plight of the Irish language, it’s hard not to get swept up.
Kneecap is, to be sure, something of a slight film; like its youthful protagonists, it remains somewhat glib and unfocused in spite of its weighty political themes. But it’s the sort of pleasant late-summer surprise we should be getting all the time, lighthearted enough for a fun weekend matinee, yet substantial enough that you won’t feel hungry an hour later. It’s also the ideal form for a musical biopic, bucking rote convention while still hitting all the satisfying beats. Its approach can be summed up in its final moments, when the traditional what-happened-next title cards are interrupted by Mo Chara (or Móglaí Bap) yelling “Aw, feck it– encore!” In the live performance which follows, you’ll have a big, goofy grin on your face– and, more likely than not, an urge to start some shit.
Kneecap
2024
dir. Rich Peppiatt
105 min.
Opens Friday, 8/2 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre & Somerville Theatre
