
Where it says "Based on a True Story" on the poster,
I'm going to have to assume the parts connecting
this film and the real world is that they both
include a place called Ireland, and that's about it.
dir: Rich Peppiatt
2024
Wow. This was like a breath of fresh air.
Well, admittedly, some parts of it felt like familiar, recycled air, with a strong smell of alcohol on its breath, but it was a lot of fun, and a trenchant reminder that Ireland is still an occupied country.
Also, within the context of a film about the attempts by certain Irish people to keep their language (and thus identity outside of the UK) alive, and the repositioning of the Irish Republican movement as an indigenous movement against the occupying British, it’s a fucking funny, deeply political, yet chaotic story.
For all its seeming DIY-zine-handcrafted-mixtape-bedroom recording aspects, there are a bunch of professionals thrown into the mix with the rank amateurs that are the two rascally ‘boys’ that really make up both the narrative and the band known as Kneecap.
And what a pair they are. I should probably mention, this is only the second film I’ve seen that’s mostly in Gaelic, or Irish as they call it to each other here. In other words, it’s subtitled a lot of the time. Because the speaking of their so-called native tongue plays such a big part in the story, and the lads are shown (and we hear them) rapping in Gaelic, it’s safe to say that at least from a viewer’s perspective, if you’re not okay with subtitles, this is not a flick you’re going to get a lot out of beyond the visuals of crazy drug-addled partying and Trainspotting inspired cheeky violence and shenanigans.
Which is, I guess, not much of a problem for me, as a non-Gaelic speaker but who absolutely loves to read subtitles. I’m not sure who the actual target market is for such a flick, beyond Ireland itself, but its argument is mostly a universal one. Well, it’s universal unless you’re actually one of those strange, dead inside people who support the oppressors over the oppressed, colonisers over those striving for freedom or if you stan for billionaires.
As for the music / rapping well, they have a target audience, and I’m not it, since I’m not Irish and I take no drugs whatsoever (in case the peelers are listening in on this one-sided conversation), but I can enjoy people rapping about their lives and keeping it real and falling all over the place whilst smacked out of their heads on coke and ketamine often at the same time.
Into their orbit these fuckups luck upon someone both sympathetic to their cause and who can actually put together some tracks. He’s a teacher who moonlights as a translator when one of the boys gets picked up by the peelers and refuses to speak anything other than his mother tongue.
He, being Mo Chara (Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh) got nabbed when his mate Móglaí Bap (Naoise Ó Caireallain) didn’t, which is convenient since he was carrying a shitload of drugs, and he obviously speaks his oppressor’s language, but why would you help the peelers when you didn’t have to? Even the basic act of speaking Irish in front of them sends the cops into a spit-flecked rage, which would be worth the price of admission alone.
When J.J. Ó Dochartaigh turns up and deliberately starts mistranslating, in order to stop the cops from charging him, he slight-of-hands the boy’s journal, which not only contains a bunch of what could be lyrics, and drugs, but also contains multiple admissions of criminal activity, probably written in both English and Irish, for convenience’s sake.
Dusting off his old musical equipment, the three end up in a garage putting some tracks together, but also abusing an unfortunate amount of drugs, which results less in musical brilliance, and more in multiple occasions of stupidity and incontinence.
JJ’s girlfriend Caitlin (Fionnulla Flaherty) is surprisingly not supportive of his seeming regression to an earlier stage of immaturity, but she’s more focussed on her objective, which is political change, through the passing of legislation that would recognise Irish as the national language of Ireland, to preserve and promote its usage, and, eventually, to force all the English out! I added that last bit in, but you know it’s implied.
We would all prefer to forget about “the Troubles” and those years of senseless violence, and all those innocent people murdered, but this flick puts forward the idea that all that tension is still there, bubbling under the surface. The Republican cause, which in this context is all about an Ireland free of the English, is just as fervent as the cause to keep the Irish subservient to their betters (ie the Loyalists / Unionists), which is a divide that transcends more than the religious question (of whose made up nonsense is the ‘right’ religion; Catholics against Protestants, Rosicrucians versus the believers in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, also known as Pastafarians, they’re all wrong, except for the last one).
Alas, like everything else, the conflict isn’t that simple. Liam has, you see, a problem. It’s not a problem brought on from using too many drugs (since, in this flick, there is barely any downside to taking drugs, not even their exorbitant prices), though it is a sexual type of dysfunction.
He asks a doctor about his problem, in that the personal and the political meet within him. You see, as far as I could figure it out, Liam can only get it up when he’s with a Unionist / Protestant girl, and he also has an Irish Republican attack of Tourette’s that means he yells slogans in Gaelic like “Tiocfaidh ár lá!” or “Our Day Will Come!” when he’s in the throes of passion, shall we say.
Contrived / believable? Of course not. Absurdly hilarious? Well, I pretty much laughed until I couldn’t breathe during those bits, because I could not believe what I was hearing and seeing
And it’s not done strictly for laughs, since it’s a reoccurring bit, and it means that his situationship with the Loyalist girl deepens, and becomes more problematic when it’s revealed that she’s the niece of the band’s nemesis, being the mean Detective Ellis (Josie Walker).
Wow, does she hate the boys. Not just because of the partisan stuff, but because Naoise’s dad is a legend amongst Republicans, who faked his death and has been on the run presumably since just after the Good Friday Agreement, and she figures the best way to get that legend called Arlo, is through harassing / molesting the band.
The other people who seem to hate the band is a group of fuckheads calling themselves the Real Republicans Against Drugs, who, like the IRA previously, threaten drug dealers in order to get a cut of the profits themselves, with the pretence that they’re defending their communities from the scourge of class A drugs. You would think they would be fans of the boys, but nah.
Once their music starts to get out, and infects the youth, their message and their sick beats spread like covid, celebrating both the chemically enhanced life and the joys of slinging off the chains of their oppressors through rapping in their native tongue.
It’s only a matter of time before they become, you guessed it, the next kings of Ireland.
I’m joking, Ireland no longer has kings. They have a Taoiseach. Now they have three.
This was, at least for me, a deliriously enjoyable and entertaining film. It is deliberately a call back to 90s movies, specifically Trainspotting and Human Traffic, but let’s be honest with ourselves, can there really be anything wrong with a film from the 2020s that appropriates a bunch of songs and the feels from the 90s, when a certain Edinburgh set flick that made a bunch of people’s careers mostly had songs from the 70s on its “classic” soundtrack?
Even if there are scenes that seem lifted wholesale, this flick doesn’t have the brutal, nasty edge that Trainspotting has, nor should they have that many similarities thematically, seeing as that flick was about heroin addiction, and this flick is about freedom from the English, fighting against oppression, and enjoying as much drugs as you can get your filthy mitts onto.
But style-wise, why not? Why not go for it, the flick says, just like the boys did
And as for the chaotic editing and cheap feel of the camerawork here, a lot of which looks like it was filmed on phones, well, it’s all perfectly of a piece with the zeitgeist, as far as I know. I knew nothing about Kneecap the band before watching this, and I suspect I learned nothing about the actual people involved (unless Michael Fassbender is actually Naoise’s dad, and shot a bunch of jerks in their stupid kneecaps for reals), but I did have a tremendous time along the way.
Kneecap has proven to be one of the best films of 2024, for my money.
8 times though I still have no desire to listen to their music again out of 10
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“Remind me again how do you take your tea: In a cup or straight in the face?” – madam stop flirting with me please, there are children present - Kneecap
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