“Kneecap” (2024)
The presence of Michael Fassbender drew me to “Kneecap,” and, given my Irish heritage, I was intrigued to see a movie mostly filmed in the Irish language about two young men making Irish hip hop.
This movie is mostly autobiographical, with the three members of hip hop group Kneecap playing themselves. The cast has even been billed as “Kneecap and Michael Fassbender.”
Liam Óg (Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh) and Naoise (Naoise Ó Cairealláin) are scraping by, selling and doing copious amounts of drugs.
Liam Óg gets arrested and JJ (JJ Ó Dochartaigh) is pulled in to be an Irish to English translator for the cops. They wind up hitting it off and reconnecting to record a hip hop album with Naoise after JJ reads Liam Óg’s notebook filled with lyrics and is impressed.
JJ quickly ditches his pent-up Irish schoolteacher behavior for the exciting life of hip hop and drugs that these two offer him, and most of the movie is him teetering between those two worlds. Ó Dochartaigh is absolutely compelling in this role, making me wish he gives up being a DJ to pursue acting.
I will say some of the drug scenes pulled me out, as the hard drugs done in the movie like MDMA, coke and ketamine are beyond my comfort level and seemed rather extreme.
As for the story, there are some side plots that intersect in ways that are made to seem coincidental but really require some suspension of disbelief.
Fassbender comes into the story as Naoise’s dad, Arló, an IRA member who faked his death years ago to evade arrest. It is a smaller role, but he is utterly transfixing as he attempts to do what’s right for him, usually at the expense of his wife (played by Simone Kirby) and son.
The film really plays on the tension that exists in Northern Ireland between people who fall on different sides of “The Troubles,” even though they’ve technically been “over” since 1998.
“Kneecap” is a great slice of modern life in Northern Ireland that should be of interest to anyone involved in anti-colonial or Indigenous language preservation movements in Ireland, the United States or around the world.