Kneecap

There’s a reason Richard Peppiatt’s Kneecap was nominated for Sundance’s Innovator Award, and it’s not just the way scribbles, illustrations and on-screen text mirror the film’s bold, bird-flipping tone. It’s the way the director—co-writing with his leads—fictionalizes the Irish band’s origin story to embrace Ireland’s rebellious, bird-flipping history.

“Every word spoken in Irish is a bullet fired for Irish freedom.”

It’s 2019 and activists in the North of Ireland are hard at work making the Irish language an official national tongue. But there’s nothing official, nothing hard working about the way two hedonistic youths put it to use in their hip hop.

Less than Orange v Green, less even than the familial tensions that drive a great deal of the story, the conflict between respectability and the anarchic spirit of the Irish is what fuels Peppiatt’s film.

Móglaí Bap (playing himself), along with best pal Mo Chara (also as himself), learned the language at the knee of his father (Michael Fassbender), who happened to be an IRA bomber that would disappear or die—no one’s sure which—not too many years into those lessons.

Here lies the fiction, no doubt. But it’s a brilliant way to layer in the history of a land’s volatile spirit. Peppiatt and his co-conspirators have no interest in sanitizing this hero’s journey. Before Kneecap could become the hip hop revolutionaries that galvanized the island’s youth around the native language by rapping only in Irish, they had to become a trio. And that couldn’t happen until Mo Chara could meet disinterested music teacher JJ (actual bandmate DJ Próval), an Irish translator sent to his aid after his drug arrest.

It merits remarking that all three bandmates make fine actors. Mo Chara is mischievously charming and DJ Próval comes off as a veteran. Their unlikely camaraderie is infectious, amplified by the audacious energy that propels the film.

Peppiatt takes a band’s origin story, wraps it in cultural trauma, globalizes it and creates a rebel song the North of Ireland can be proud of.

Winner of the audience award at Sundance this year, Kneecap is a hard film not to like. As utterly and unapologetically Irish as the film is, it is also blisteringly universal. Every culture is built on our stories. Every story needs a language.