The Irish Rap Rebellion

In 2017, the fledgling Belfast hip-hop artist Naoise “Móglaí Bap” Ó Cairealláin and a friend were chased down by police for spray-painting the word “Cearta” — Irish for “Rights” — on a local bus stop. Móglaí Bap got away, but his accomplice was arrested. As the rapper’s friend awaited questioning, he refused to speak the Queen’s English and insisted on an Irish translator. As it happened, the following day a protest march had been scheduled in downtown Belfast to support proposed provisions to the Irish Language Act that would officially recognize the language. So began a rap revolt in Northern Ireland. 

Rich Peppiatt’s movie Kneecap gets its name from the rap trio Móglaí Bap would go on to form with fellow young ruffian and emcee Liam Óg “Mo Chara” Ó Hannaidh, and their older beat maker JJ “DJ Próvaí” Ó Dochartaigh, an Irish-language schoolteacher who would go on to lose his job for presenting the words “Brits Out” scribbled on his buttocks at a show. The events of the aforementioned 24 hours, between the arrest and the two demonstrations — the individual protest in the interrogation room, and the mass march the next day — formed the basis for Kneecap’s single C.E.A.R.T.A. and are further dramatized with mischievous energy in Peppiatt’s propulsive indie darling about the group’s origins and exploits. However, the film sees Mo Chara take on the role of Móglaí Bap’s pinched pal in the arrest, while DJ Próvaí shows up as his translator, setting off a ludicrous chain reaction of linguistic rebellion.

Further blurring the line between drama and docufiction, the trio play themselves in Kneecap, providing a sense of street-smart authenticity à la rapper biopics 8 Mile and Get Rich Or Die Tryin’. Mo Chara narrates the film and immediately repudiates Hollywood’s usual framing of Belfast stories — see also, Kenneth Branagh’s pseudo-biopic Belfast — in which The Troubles are a primary catalyst. The film doesn’t ignore this wider political subtext, but limits references to IRA bombings and Catholic-Protestant clashes to a brief, tongue-in-cheek montage.

But if Kneecap refuses to focus on The Troubles, it unfolds in their shadow, with English supremacy taking center stage. This looming presence is further dramatized in the form of Móglaí Bap’s fictionalized father Arlo (Michael Fassbender), a former member of the Irish Republican Army believed dead by local authorities, but who still meets with his son in secret. The ripple effects of Ireland’s 1921 schism reverberate through the decades.

Two narratives unfold in parallel. The first sees diligent activists, like DJ Próvaí’s wife, Caitlin (Fionnuala Flaherty), making principled appeals to the U.K. government and crown-loyal Irish Unionists. The second sees Móglaí Bap and Mo Chara creating trouble for the former and for the local cops — or “the peelers,” as the rappers call them — between graffiti, drug dealing and obscene and provocative gestures at their underground shows (for which they’re harassed by a policewoman who bears a resemblance to Margaret Thatcher). Further complicating matters are various Irish republican factions who agree with Kneecap’s anti-colonial stances, but are also firmly anti-drug use, leading to some amusing gang warfare.

DJ Próvaí, a gifted comedic actor, is stuck firmly between these two ongoing forms of resistance. Hiding his secret identity from his wife and his students under an Irish tricolor balaclava, he attempts to navigate a fish-out-of-water story as an uptight, relatively straightforward middle-aged man dragged into a spry and youthful hip-hop story. 

The DJ and his young comrades share a common goal: promoting the Irish language as a means of protest against centuries-long English-language supremacy and British oppression. While a recent U.K. census suggests an uptick in Irish language use (if only by a small fraction), a mere 6,000 people in Northern Ireland still speak it as their primary language at home — fewer than those who speak Polish and Lithuanian. This gives the group’s cultural mission a sense of urgency that helps explain why neither the group nor the movie seem overly invested in respectability politics. 

Opposing viewpoints do feature on occasion, but Peppiatt frames the group with such alluring visual energy, it’s hard not to be convinced by them. We slip and slide across the stage with them during their Ketamine-fueled performances, while the frame’s very fabric is brought to life by lyrics and translations that pop up across the screen in the form of scribbles, as though ripped from the group’s notebooks. While most musical biopics might delve into the dangers of drug use, with late-second-act arcs depicting downfall and redemption, Peppiatt has no desire for moralizing. Kneecap embodies the group’s unapologetic hedonism and eventually becomes a protest film in and of itself, aimed at consciousness-raising and linguistic revival. It is also a whole lot of fun. 

Every aesthetic detail feels enhanced by the trio’s punk sensibility and raucous, Cypress Hill-meets-techno sound, down to the movie’s framing and editing. Cinematographer Ryan Kernaghan’s camera tilts on an axis and takes 360-degree turns during more intoxicating numbers; split-screen shots of the trio in different locations aren’t divided by straight lines, but by pulsating equalizers in motion, as though the trio’s passions are straining against and bursting through the screen. The fourth wall is a subject of frequent assault through the 105-minute runtime, especially by Mo Chara’s sarcastic, venomous voiceover that leaves no room for misinterpretation of the movie’s politics. Hip-hop is a genre steeped in resisting state authority, and in the vein of genre progenitors like Public Enemy, N.W.A. and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Kneecap’s music is a straight middle finger to centuries of colonial subjugation, expressed through the language of musical revolt and addressed directly to the camera, like a televised revolution.