Vague Visages’ Kneecap review contains minor spoilers. Rich Peppiatt’s 2024 movie features Móglaí Bap, Mo Chara and DJ Próvai. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews.

The Belfast-based rap trio Kneecap have frequently professed in interviews that they hope their music “riles people up,” taking great pleasure at scandalizing right-wingers with lyrics lazily interpreted as anti-British, pro-terrorism and very pro-drugs. Perhaps the group’s  greatest musical achievement is that, even as they giddily jump between the Irish language and English, they manage to sell every raucous punchline without ever sounding like they’re merely setting out to offend. Every provocation is justified either in a political statement or the often high concepts of the songs themselves. Writer/director Rich Peppiatt’s eponymous biopic of Kneecap’s rise to fame stays true to the spirit of the music by perfecting the same balancing act, as the film never feels like it’s trying hard to offend, even as the director aims the gleefully puerile satire at everybody, from Pro-British loyalists to the trigger-happy Republicans convinced The Troubles are still happening nearly 30 years after the Good Friday Agreement.

If Kneecap was merely the first “edgy” comedy in years with gags as shocking as they are laugh-out-loud hysterical, that would be enough to recommend it. What makes it one of the year’s most essential films so far is the way Peppiatt’s screenplay interrogates the artistic intent behind the band’s button-pushing lyrics in a more meaningful context. With only 6,000 native Irish speakers left in Ireland’s north, should this band assign themselves as the poster boys of a language on the brink of extinction, when they’re using it to court controversy? It’s testament to Kneecap that they’re as willing for Peppiatt’s film to act as cultural criticism of their music as much as a celebration.

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All three Kneecap members play lightly fictionalized versions of themselves in their acting debuts, with JJ functioning as the elected audience surrogate. He first appears as an Irish language teacher whose partner is involved with the campaign to help make Irish an officially recognized language in Northern Ireland. The woman moonlights as an interpreter, but one evening when the police call, she insists that JJ should go down to the station to translate instead, where he crosses paths with Liam, a low-level dark web drug dealer who refuses to speak English as a form of protest. JJ soon learns that this isn’t particularly politically motivated, but after reading Liam’s notebook filled with lyrics, he realizes that he may have finally encountered the unlikely voice that will make Irish cool to a disengaged younger generation. Alongside Liam’s childhood friend, Naoise (Móglaí Bap) — the son of a notorious, presumed-dead IRA figurehead (Michael Fassbender as Arló Ó Cairealláin) — the trio start taking drugs and making music together, with JJ struggling to hide his second life. He performs wearing an Irish flag balaclava so his pupils and fellow teachers won’t spot him, but as the band’s profile raises after a string of notorious gigs — culminating in JJ’s buttocks, painted with the Republican slogan “Brits Out,” appearing on the evening news — it proves hard to remain out of the spotlight.

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Kneecap opens with a gag about how every movie and TV show set in Northern Ireland is focused exclusively on The Troubles, a statement of intent that this story is distinctly about the post-Good Friday Agreement generation — young people whose ideologies weren’t shaped by conflict but were raised by those who were. Remnants of The Troubles remain in plain sight throughout Belfast, from the heavy loyalist police presence in Republican areas to the murals across the city, but it largely registers as ambient noise to younger Millennials and Gen-Z, with Liam and Naoise only invoking the troubles when trying to convince doctors to give them heavy doses of prescription drugs for their “mental health” (wink wink). The two childhood friends both believe in a united Ireland, still fling darts at a photo of Margaret Thatcher and remain true to Naoise’s father’s lesson that “every word of Irish spoken is a bullet for Irish freedom,” but the music they make isn’t simply an attempt to raise awareness of their cause. 

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It’s a middle finger to authority figures in general, punching up at the powers that be who still dictate every inch of their lives with the same crass irreverence as early Eminem. I imagine they would be proud of one-liners invoking everything from the potato famine to the IRA’s attempted assassination of The Iron Lady, as well as a subplot which reveals one of the boys can only sleep with loyalist women so he can scream Republican slogans at the point of climax. That blossoms into Kneecap’s one misstep: a romantic subplot — one that thuds to a halt every time it appears — which seems to be included so the film’s nervous financial backers could point out that the comedy production isn’t “anti-British” by any stretch.

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I might only be making this comparison because I saw Kneecap in the same week Marshall Mathers dropped his tepidly received latest album, The Death of Slim Shady, but the band’s penchant for ruffling feathers via their music and high-profile publicity stunts (as documented in the film) feels akin to that of the Detroit rapper. Eminem’s recent LP — which features tired tirades against Gen-Z and the transgender community (little different to the lazy gags one can find on Elon Musk’s X feed) — is a testament to how far the American artist has fallen creatively, no longer able to marry a substantive social argument with knowingly shocking and darkly funny lyricism. The concept behind the album is the artist confronting his Slim Shady alter ego, taking aim at the criticism that he created a character purely to say the most offensive things possible, which bears little weight when it’s coming from a 50-something who provokes people to try and stay relevant. The Death of Slim Shady makes for a fascinating counterpoint to Kneecap, which doesn’t shy away from the fact that the band’s stage personas are outsized and liable to offend, and that the accuracy of their political leanings can’t be dictated via lyrics written to get a crowd pumped up.

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Both Kneecap and the band themselves take great pleasure in getting laughs from addressing the taboos which remain in place long after The Troubles have ended. And for all the talk of this movie likely causing controversy, I can imagine that directly addressing these issues within a bombastic, populist music biopic may prove cathartic to many in the region. Considering the history of the Irish language and the way it became a fraught topic in the North’s recent past, Kneecap concedes that the titular band might be pop culture’s best hopes to keep it alive. You need to play with fire to catch people’s attention, and even though the region’s history remains in plain sight, the way Kneecap invokes this concept through song ensures that it can’t be conveniently ignored for much longer.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper.

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