Kneecap’s Biopic Brought a Bold Irish Voice to the Big Screen This Year

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“Guess who’s back in the news? It’s your favorite Republican hoods,” goes a caustic and cheeky line from Irish language rap group Kneecap. The Belfast and Derry-born trio—Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap, and DJ Próvai—first came to prominence this year at Sundance, where their self-titled biopic, a dramatic rendering of their real-life story, became the first Irish language film to debut there. They arrived at the festival in an armored police van, Irish tricolor flares blazing, Próvai’ in a similarly colored balaclava. Since then, they’ve cleaned up at the British Independent Film Awards (mooning the crowd for good measure), and have been shortlisted for the Oscars International Feature category and Best Original Song.

Kneecap the film interpolates the band’s (kind of) true-to-life ascent and the contemporary wave of the Irish language and culture revival. It’s set amid protests for the Irish Language Act, a movement to give Irish the same status and rights as the colonial-established English. The band play themselves, with support from Michael Fassbender, who plays Bap’s on-the-run Republican father, and Simone Kirby, who plays his mother. It’s a staggeringly impressive acting debut for the trio, who co-wrote the project with director Rich Peppiatt. The boisterous music of their debut album Fine Art propels the antics, and Peppiatt’s psychedelic cinematography (plus, some use of claymation) brings a kinetic energy to the biopic genre.

The film opens with stock shots of Belfast in the grips of the Troubles conflict: occupying soldiers stomp the streets, car bombs explode. But this story is different. We meet our semi-fictional Mo Chara and Móglaí raving and dealing drugs in a forest outside of Belfast, trying and failing to evade a police raid. With Mo Chara taken into custody and refusing to speak anything other than Irish, Próvai—a teacher and Irish language activist—is called in by authorities to act as a translator. Their interaction becomes the genesis for a rebel rap group. What follows is a wacky ride through their early drug-addled gigs and efforts to evade local paramilitaries and a police chief with a grudge. Mo Chara and a Protestant girl engage in a relationship across the divide, where Unionist and Nationalist badinage becomes “sexy” role-play. Mo Chara can’t help but steal a Protestant marching band’s baton, putting in motion a truly stunning chase scene, set to The Prodigy.

There’s tough and tender moments—the fraught relationship between Móglaí and his father, who sees his son as a reprobate and refuses to speak Irish to him. It’s a damning indictment, isolating him from his culture, and a reflection of friction in a modernizing indigenous culture. The lasting impact of The Troubles on women in the North is channeled by the agoraphobic Kirby, who also deftly highlights how you should never mess with a West Belfast ma.

Much of the driving dialogue is in Irish, and most importantly, in the Ulster dialect. Próvai—who, yes, was an Irish teacher—taught Fassbender this dialect over Zoom. It is moving to see the North’s identity and culture articulated on screen in such a charismatic way, that sticks it up to the stereotypes and imagines new within an indigenous language.

The Irish pop culture wave continues to crest, taking in the complexity of stories from the North of Ireland. Look to Derry Girls, which tells the story of angsty and awkward teenage girls navigating Catholic school, crushes, and the Troubles conflict. Kneecap finds its pressure point with a generation known as the “ceasefire babies”—those born just before and following the Good Friday Agreement, which brought an imperfect sense of peace to the North and the promise of something better that has never been quite met. The North remains a place festering with intergenerational trauma and stagnant politics, but in Kneecap, we see a youth culture determined to carve its own space. The Irish language is not a plot device, but a liberating creative channel. Kneecap is as smart as it is silly, a sweary rebel yell for indigenous cultures everywhere.