by Julian Wood
Worth: $19.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Naoise Ó Cairealláin, Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh, JJ Ó Dochartaigh, Michael Fassbender, Simone Kirby, Josie Walker, Fionnuala Flaherty, Jessica Reynolds
Intro:
Parts of it are laugh-out-loud funny and parts are strangely uplifting … heart and authenticity in spades.
Kneecapping (let’s not go into the gory details) was a popular form of rough justice meted out by the ‘gun men’ in Northern Ireland (NI) during the not-fully-resolved ‘Troubles’. What a complicated place it is. Though, as the film comments in its opening sequence, most of the world only sees NI represented via bombs and sectarian violence.
The protagonists of Kneecap are in danger of receiving a little attention from the paramilitaries themselves. Kneecap, by the way, is also a grisly jokey stage name for our heroes’ hip hop group. The two brothers at the centre have Gaelic names and they even rap in the native language. For them, it is part of keeping the language and their culture alive, and it is a political statement in itself. It is not exactly mainstream, of course, as the language survives on a thin base numerically, but their die-hard fans love them to bits.
The two lads, Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh and Naoise Ó Cairealláin, play themselves under their stage names, Mo Chara and Moglai Bap, and this puts the film somewhere between mockumentary and straight-out comedy. When the pair are offered management from a man-child school music teacher (JJ Ó Dochartaigh), who can also lay down some beats, they wonder if Kneecap may be headed for an unlikely time in the limelight. They don’t have too many illusions, but either way, they are following in the tradition laid down by their fanatically Irish dad (Michael Fassbender), who is in hiding or dead; a wanted man either way, who left their mum (Simone Kirby) all alone and she is struggling to recover, let alone leave the house.
Initially, there are a lot of gigs in dingy and dodgy clubs to audiences of less than fifty, with the music teacher wearing an Irish balaclava to hide his identity. The road to the Big Time is very twisty. The scene is saturated with recreational drug taking, which the boys embrace with gusto, and this adds another layer of the comedy of excess, in a similar way to Trainspotting.
Kneecap is carried by the charm and charisma of the cheeky leads. It has the gentle self-mocking humour of The Sapphires or The Commitments, but it also has a lot more edge than those films. In its way, it is quite subversive. Overall, it is hard to describe, which is testament to its originality. Parts of it are laugh-out-loud funny and parts are strangely uplifting. Certainly, it has heart and authenticity in spades. Ultimately, too, it has direct relevance to an Australian audience, where we continue to struggle with keeping our own Indigenous languages alive.