'Kneecap' is the Irish Language '8 Mile' I Never Knew I Needed
It's time to get Kneecap-pilled. The crowd-pleasing 'Kneecap' movie is a great place to start.
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‘Kneecap’ opens this weekend in a handful of markets.
Kneecap the rap trio is built around confrontational politics and aesthetics, and yet Kneecap the movie, which tells a fictionalized version of the group’s origin story, isn’t particularly artistically challenging. It’s a pop movie about some punks, a warm earnest hug about a satirical punch to the face, a discrepancy sure to be noted in every negative review of the film.
Yet for me it was a happy marriage. Just understanding the basic historical underpinnings of the entire Kneecap project (let alone their accents, when they’re even speaking English) feels like it requires hours of lectures and running annotations, about everything from protestant militiae to Ulster slang. To have that distilled into a slick, 8 Mile-style pseudo-biopic package with a minimum of explainer scenes is a gift, not a capitulation. I loved Kneecap, which feels like a very easy thing to do.
So: “Kneecap” is the name of the movie, and also the name of the rap trio from West Belfast whose origin story the movie tells. The members all play themselves. Kneecap’s (the group) shtick (or perhaps just niche) is straightforward: they rap mostly in Irish. Partly as an act of resistance against the British Empire that has suppressed the language since at least the 14th century, and partly as a way to reclaim their identity. (And as part of a broader project of anti-colonial solidarity that has seen them skip SXSW over the festival’s ties to the US army and weapons manufacturers).
“Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for the cause of Irish independence,” says one of the Kneecap lads’ fathers, played by Michael Fassbender, repeating an old Sinn Fein slogan.
The slogan is a handy distillation of the father’s reasoning for drilling his son in the Irish language. And yet invoking metaphorical “bullets” is its own can of worms, especially for the main characters. Kneecap are “Children of the Good Friday Agreements,” as they self-identify in the opening narration, born after the bulk of the armed struggles between Irish independence agitators and their Unionist-loyalist adversaries in the 1960s-90s in Belfast were already over. And so the film essentially asks: what does “resistance” look like in an era of Diet Colonialism, when both sides have agreed to stop car bombing each other?
Our heroes are Moglai Bap (like the Jungle Book) and Mo Chara (which means “my friend” in Irish), and it’s a good thing they have nicknames to save me from trying to type Naoise Ó Cairealláin or Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh too many times (Naoise is pronounced “Nisha,” you’re on your own with the rest). They both mostly rock the classic skin fade + Northface jacket combo (which I gather is the Celtic version of an Edgar without the catchy name). When we first meet them, they’re on the run from the cops, aka the “peelers.” The peelers are always after them, partly because Moglai’s dad (Michael F. Assbender) is an ex-IRA heavy who faked his own death, and partly because Moglai and Mo Chara are actual criminals who make their living selling drugs.
Moglai gets away but Mo Chara gets pinched, and when he’s brought in for questioning, he demands an Irish interpreter. “Everyone who knows Irish also knows English,” growls the unamused police officer, who nonetheless is forced to reluctantly honor the request.
The only interpreter they can find is JJ (JJ Ó Dochartaigh), a square music teacher at the Irish language high school. So JJ rolls out of bed, heads down to the station, and during the course of the interrogation, is asked to comb through Mo Chara’s notebook, which is full of little scribbles and poems about drugs and girls and parties and revolutionary attitudes, all in Irish. JJ instantly gets the idea to set some of these musings to music. And so it is that the group Kneecap is born (partly a true story, it seems).
JJ soon comes to be known as DJ Provaí (a sort of pun on “okay” in Irish and a slang term for the Provisional IRA, one of many things the movie wisely doesn’t get bogged down trying to explain). “The Irish language is like the last Dodo, living behind glass in captivity,” JJ explains to Moglai and Mo Chara. “I want to smash the glass and set it free,”
Which is to say, to tear a dying language out of textbooks and make it a living thing again, the way languages are meant to be. Every group or artist should be so lucky as to have a clear mission statement, let alone one this rousing. Kneecap’s in particular is catnip for both linguistics professors and party rap enthusiasts alike— a dichotomy embodied by DJ Provaí, the teacher-turned-rabble-rouser.
Kneecap’s raison d’etre (pardon my French) is so hard to fault, in fact, that the movie’s most difficult task is trying to contrive some antagonists. Luckily Kneecap are not only champions of the Irish language and outspoken Republicans, but also avid drug users. It’s a testament to the lovably rascally Irish character that Kneecap’s rampant abuse of cocaine, ketamine, and MDMA is depicted as straightforwardly good fun, without a scintilla of cautionary tale that would inevitably creep into any such American depiction. Another scene depicts one of the most affable movie breakups ever filmed, practically codifying the stereotype that the Irish value good times over family. Part of Kneecap’s art is blurring the line between perpetuating stereotypes and taking the piss.
Kneecap’s hedonism soon puts them at odds with the Radical Republicans Against Drugs (RRAD), a group depicted as a collection of sort of meatheads-desperate-for-a-cause. There’s also Mo Chara’s Unionist girlfriend, Georgia, played by Jessica Reynolds (think: the Irish Anya Taylor-Joy playing Brittany Murphy in 8 Mile). They have hot sex and shout competing IRA and UDA slogans at each other while they cum. Looks fun! Though her protestant relatives naturally object to her being defiled by Fenian scum, which causes some other problems for Kneecap.
These are, for the most part, very tried-and-true movie antagonists (a forbidden romance, the proverbial disapproving principal who hates rock’n’roll), which detracts some from the more natural one. Which is that, when you’re the proud and outspoken members of an oppressed group or minority class, you start to get treated like spokespeople for that group, regardless of whether you ever wanted to be. And then pretty soon you’re taking criticism from both sides: outsiders who dislike the entire class you represent, and insiders who resent you for saying anything that doesn’t specifically reflect them (like rapping about sex and drugs, say). Should anti-colonialism be deadly serious or cheeky fun?