Kneecap
Rich Peppiatt, Ireland, UK, 2024o
When the band leader Liam's party night ends in a police interrogation room, JJ, his Irish teacher who is supposed to interpret for the English-speaking policewoman, not only helps him to hide the LSD in his notebook, but also to spice up the texts in it about drugs, sex and resistance against the British establishment into hip-hop hits. But the police, the government and paramilitary groups all have reasons to want to stifle the band's success. Between radio boycotts and arson attacks, the chaotic boys unexpectedly become a symbol of an entire generation.
Kneecap is a film about a hip-hop band whose three members constantly consume ketamine and other drugs so they can rap about it. About a band whose songs are promptly banned from radio stations because they contain too many vulgar words, references to sex, and drugs. In which the housewives and mothers of the city take to the barricades to get these songs back on the radio. The film is both radically political and extremely funny, as vulgar, drug-glorifying, and sexually open as its characters. In short: inspiring and heartwarming. It is set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where a ceasefire has been in place for thirty years, but the traces of violence are still visible on the facades of houses and in people's faces. The fathers are dead or on the run, and one's own identity is constantly under attack, especially if one considers oneself a Republican. Every word spoken in Irish, as learned from one's father who was in the IRA, is considered “a bullet for freedom.” In this case, Kneecap demonstrates to even the most skeptical that hip-hop is nothing more than a machine gun. The band Kneecap really exists, its members play themselves, and their music is so energetic that even those who are not particularly interested in hip-hop will find themselves carried away by it.
Dominic Schmid