“Can we do a biopic in real time?” Kneecap director Rich Peppiatt recalls asking himself. The film tells the true story of the Belfast rap group Kneecap and its energetic, rebellious rise with their Irish-language songs defying the English rule. In a unique twist, the three members of Kneecap— Naoise Ó Cairealláin (aka Moglaí Bap), JJ Ó Dochartaigh (aka DJ Provaí), and Liam ÓG Ó Hannaidh (aka Mo Chara)—play themselves in a film that ingeniously blurs the line between documentary and drama. It’s a strong addition to small pool of films like Nomadland that cast people in the dramas of their own lives while giving them agency over their stories.
While Peppiatt acknowledges that it was a risk casting the rappers since they hadn’t acted previously, he says it felt obvious. “A music biopic is a genre that’s been done many times and it’s often at the end of people’s careers or when they’re dead,” he notes, speaking with POV via Zoom. “But the idea of making a biopic about a band who weren’t even signed, who weren’t really known outside of the isle of Ireland, hadn’t ever released an album—it makes no sense on paper, frankly, and they’re rapping in a language that barely anyone speaks. It doesn’t scream Hollywood movie treatment.”
The film ingeniously captures something akin to a real-time biopic/time capsule as the story unfolds with the rise of the relatively unknown Gaeilgeoirs, or Irish speakers, as they catch local interest performing in Belfast pubs. Locals note the uniqueness of the Irish free verse, and the band becomes something of a cultural spark in the fight to preserve and protect Irish language rights. Peppiatt says the group underwent six months of acting classes to hone their chops and translate their skills from performing on stage to acting for a camera.
For Kneecap, they admit to having some concerns since they were early in their careers, as the group came together around December 2017. They’re ultimately taking a risk with their own story. “If it was crap, then everyone working on the Kneecap film will move on to the next film, but we’ll still be Kneecap the band,” says Ó Cairealláin.
But the group jokes that these were the roles they were born to play. “In some ways, it’s hard because, obviously, there’s some crossovers with reality and fiction,” says Ó Cairealláin. “Trying to separate them two things is tough sometimes. But I suppose the best part was [that] we all knew that we had an interesting authentic story to tell. I think the best people to tell that story was ourselves.”
“Us acting ourselves meant that Rich giving us any tips or criticism, you’re able to say, ‘Well, that’s not what I would do. I’m the authority on me,’” agrees Ó Dochartaigh. “So it was a wee bit more challenging for him, but it actually worked out better because it honed the truthfulness of it and all the colloquialisms that he was writing as an Englishman.”
Peppiatt says he didn’t look to films like Nomadland, or other hybrids that cast everyday people in dramatizations of their own stories, like Clint Eastwood’s train caper 15:17 to Paris. Instead, he cites influences in La Haine and Trainspotting—works that tap into specificity of place, vitality of youth, and counter-cultural spirit in their respective French and Scottish milieus.
“There’s a scene in Kneecap where JJ is [looking] in the mirror and he’s wearing a balaclava, and that is completely my doff of the cap to the famous scene in the mirror in La Haine. And there’s a scene where JJ climbs into a bin, and that’s Trainspotting‘s Scottish toilet,” he says referencing the scene where Ewan McGregor dives into the loo in search of drugs. Kneecap, like those films, boisterously breaks new ground by firmly rooting itself in a distinct portrait of language, culture, and community.
Peppiatt, who isn’t a native Irish speaker and didn’t know the language when he first was floored by Kneecap’s music, says he studied the language for two years during pre-production. Even then, the director notes that writing Kneecap was a collaborative affair. (All three members of Kneecap receive a story credit.)
“I would write the script, but then every draft, we would then sit down in the pub and we’d read through it,” explains Peppiatt. “The translation was very complicated in the sense that their Irish is not book Irish. They pretty much have their own vernacular, and they’ve created words themselves, which no one else uses. That becomes quite complicated when we’re trying to translate something when it’s uncharted territory.”
While the House of Commons voted in December 2022 in favour of recognizing the Irish language in Northern Ireland through the Identity and Language Act, the film chronicles the on-the-ground movement that mobilized in part through the popularity of Kneecap’s words giving voice to the people. The film has a running mantra that an Irish word carries the impact of a bullet, while speaking the tongue—one of Europe’s oldest languages—is an inherently political act. The band says that writing the script while their language became protected helped solidify the importance of the story.
“Before Kneecap, there wasn’t much contemporary Irish language music that touched on youth culture and maybe partying and stuff like that there, so when we put ‘C.E.A.R.T.A.’ out, everybody assumed that it would be similar to the Irish music that came before—it would be very nice and talking about thatched cottages or something beautiful or artistic or whatever,” says Ó Cairealláin. “But in reality, we were just talking about young Irish people growing up in the city and part of that lifestyle was partying and having the craic [a good time]. There the assumption that it was something pretty and artsy, they were going to put us on the radio and then last minute it got dropped because they actually listened to the song.”
That censorship proves a decisive moment for Kneecap in the film. Belfast residents who’d previously denounced the band for their coarse lyrics and hooligan ways, which include doling out drugs from the stage and performing under all sorts of influences, see the hunger of youth to speak their native tongue and preserve the language for future generations. The music becomes an anthem of rebellion.
“‘C.E.A.R.T.A.’ means ‘rights’ and that was written off the back of the Irish language marches for that legislation,” adds Ó Dochartaigh. “It was about spray painting ‘C.E.A.R.T.A.’ on the wall, getting chased by the cops then, so that all came about that as well and you see that being played in the film.”
Kneecap finds an antagonistic copper in Detective Ellis (Josie Walker), who especially pesters Naoise’s family. She snoops to discover the truth about his father, Arló (played by Oscar-nominated actor Michael Fassbender), who was a fierce advocate for language rights before “disappearing.” The father and son have clandestine meetings where they catch up in Gaelic.
Ó Cairealláin avoids distinguishing fact from fiction when asked about his family’s storyline, but notes that some of the most seemingly dramatic, or cinematic, elements of Kneecap are actually ripped from life. Among them is the film’s arresting opening scene in which Ó Cairealláin describes his christening—a covert affair in the forest that’s interrupted by helicopters and soldiers conducting what they believe to be a raid on the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
“The British Army thought they uncovered some sort of secret IRA training camp and there was literally a helicopter hovering above my 10 family members and a priest,” explains Ó Cairealláin. “The fact that story’s true, I think, gives you an idea of where the fact and fiction starts or begins. They’re quite surreal stories, to be honest—to have a helicopter hover above you while a priest squirts water on your face,” he laughs.
For Ó Dochartaigh, though, he says there’s lots of truth to his storyline in which he loses his job as a school teacher for his involvement with the group. The film shows how Ó Dochartaigh donned a balaclava—knitted as an Irish flag—to mask his appearance from his students while performing as DJ Provaí. “I was teaching in the school and a lot of the students used to come to the gigs in and they didn’t realize it was me at the start. I wore a balaclava to keep my anonymity. So I had plausible deniability,” he explains.
The film observes as the teacher witnesses the influence that Kneecap has on the young people. Students quote lyrics in class, listen to Kneecap during lessons, and weave Irish into their slang. “Then they’d be shouting up your name and then singing the lyrics on the corridor. And then the school started getting wind of this and asking me questions, ‘Are you DJ Provaí?’” says Ó Dochartaigh. “I was denying it for a while and then they went and got all this evidence going through our videos. It got to the point where everybody was the worst kept secret, so I had to leave the school because those two lifestyles weren’t compatible anymore.”
For Peppiatt, who comes to Kneecap with a background in journalism and documentary, he says it was natural to find the truth of the story and situate these personal tales within the wider fight for language rights. “Once you’re a journalist, you’re always a journalist and that nose for a story never leaves you,” he observes. “For me, meeting Kneecap and seeing what they would do at a grassroots level with their music, and in contrast to this political backdrop where the Irish language is battling for recognition, I thought there was a really interesting story there. While politicians were absolutely failing to make any progress around the Irish language, there were these three lads who were out on stage rapping and throwing drugs into the crowd and basically causing absolute mayhem on stages around Ireland and were really having an impact.”
Kneecap, the band, actually finds some of its own roots in documentary. The group cites the 1995 doc Dancing on Narrow Ground as a source of inspiration for its depiction of youth culture amid political divides. “I think a big inspiration for us is the reality on the ground amongst young people, especially amongst Catholics and Protestants in Belfast, that young people don’t care as much about the politics that came before them,” notes Ó Cairealláin.
He adds that people initially assumed that Kneecap sought to sow divides, rather than bridge them, due to the group’s rambunctious spirit and defiant lyrics. “I think that’s why that documentary really resonated with us because, even back then, the young people got along well, but it’s when they went back to their own communities that the older people were saying, ‘No, you can’t be doing that. We can’t mix like that, we can’t have that fun. But when young people are in front of each other, they’re having the craic, they’re taking the piss out of each other.”
“This religious divide that was created by the British state to separate the people, it doesn’t really exist anymore because all the young people coming up now don’t care about religion,” adds Ó Dochartaigh. “They don’t go to mass, they don’t practice, and if they do, they do it in the house themselves. Organized religion separates everybody. It’s not a thing anymore in Ireland. Everybody’s grown out of it. So the sooner we realize that, the better.”
The group hopes that the film, like Kneecap’s music, finds universal resonance in communities that fight for uniqueness in language and culture. “As we always say, Irish language has always been cool. We are just highlighting how cool it is,” says Ó Cairealláin. “It’s one of the oldest written languages in Europe that’s still spoken today. I don’t think we can make it any cooler than it is. We can just use it as a tool to let people know and to get people invested in it and inspired to learn the language.”
