Rich Peppiatt’s 2024 film, Kneecap, is a music “biopic” based on the eponymous Northern Irish hip-hop trio. The film begins with an illegal drug-fuelled rave and the arrest of Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh (better known by his stage name Mo Chara) who asserts his right to communicate through Gaeilge with the officers detaining him. This introduces him to JJ Ó Dochartaigh (DJ Provaí), a one-time Police Service of Northern Ireland translator and full-time music teacher at a local Irish language school. After discovering Ó Hannaidh and his best friend Naoise Ó Cairealláin (Móglaí Bap) are talented rappers, Ó Dochartaigh agrees to produce an EP with them in his makeshift garage studio. Their success lands Ó Dochartaigh in trouble with his school’s Board of Governors, places Ó Hannaidh in the crosshairs of a local PSNI officer, and complicates Ó Cairealláin’s relationship with his “deceased” republican paramilitary father (Michael Fassbender) who is in hiding in the Republic, although presumed by many to be dead.

The film is a “biopic” in the sense that it hits many of the beats (no pun intended) of the Kneecap group’s rise to prominence. Mo Chara really was at one stage arrested and refused to speak English to the PSNI but, in actuality, his detention was for spray-painting the word “cearta” (“rights”) on a bus stop on the eve of an Irish Language Act march in Belfast (Mullally 2019). DJ Provaí also got in trouble with his real-life school’s Board of Governors. Offering extra-diegetic evidence of the school’s disciplinary action against him, he posted their disciplinary letter to social media (@KNEECAPCEOL, July 1, 2020). Unlike the romanticised version in the film, Móglaí Bap’s father is not a republican paramilitary on the run. Bap is cautious about justifying the moments of artistic license the film takes, explaining:

These characters represent where we come from and the people we grew up with […]. So it’s not only our story, but it’s everybody’s stories. Like, half of my class, their parents would’ve been ex-IRA members. So it’s not necessarily always our personal story, but it is the collective story of Belfast. (Ó Cairealláin cited in Olsen 2024)

In the film’s opening monologue, Mo Chara reminds us how versions of this story have often been told reductively through cinema: “Do you know what – every fucking story about Belfast starts like this…”. His words are followed by a smash cut to a rapid montage of guns, soldiers, bombs, and riots before he adds: “But not this one!” Instead, Kneecap is, at heart, a joyous film. It is tonally reminiscent of Good Vibrations, the 2013 film chronicling the life of Terri Hooley and his relationship with the Belfast punk scene in the 1970s. But, unlike that and many other films set in Belfast, Kneecap is not about the time of the Troubles per se: it is more interested in exploring the stories of the generation that came afterwards.

These are the children who grew up in areas like West Belfast that were physically transformed into highly militarized zones since the early 1970s […]. Then, after 25 years of the Troubles, all of this was supposed to suddenly end. What transpired, of course, is a lot more complicated. Because the media tend to report traumatic events rather than their long-term consequences. (de Brún 2024)

The narrative sets out the tales of three men whose response to the trauma of the Troubles’ legacy is to take drugs, drink alcohol, and make hip-hop in the Irish language. Many reviews of the film provide insight into the importance the film places on the national language. However, the approach here is somewhat differently angled and will consider the formal and aesthetic qualities of the film and its relationship to many established mainstream cinematic counterparts.

The film is a rare pastiche of several generic precursors but emerges most fundamentally as a hip-hop biopic. The basic structure of classic music biopics is a charting of the rise to fame of an artist or band before their success is interrupted by some conflict or affliction. We then see them retire, or at the very least retreat from performing, before making a triumphant return in which “life and art are reconciled” (Babington and Evans 1985: 120). We see this structure recurring in films as diverse as What’s Love Got to Do with It (1993), Ray (2004), and Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). The formula is so commonplace it has become the subject of parody in films like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007) and Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022). Classically structured music biopics like these are compelling because they offer an insight into the creation of “an average legend” (ibidem) long after the artist has achieved that mythical status. Certain hip-hop biopics, however, like 8 Mile (2002) and Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (2005) diverge from this classical template by focussing entirely on the initial stages of artists’ careers, at which point they use their talent to escape their working class and often violent lives into eventual fame and fortune. Kneecap diverges even further from the generic formula because that initial rise to fame is ongoing as a “biopic in real time” (Olsen 2024). Imagining someone making a Queen biopic in 1974 would give a good sense of this film’s unique status within the genre. For many people, especially those not familiar with contemporary hip-hop, Kneecap the film will be their first experience of Kneecap the band. But the film is not a mere promotional tool for a band on the rise. It is an extension of their art, which uses hip-hop and the Irish language to comment on and critique contemporary culture.

A notable example of this occurred in 2022 when the group unveiled a mural in a traditionally Catholic area of West Belfast depicting a burning PSNI car with the words “Kneecap” and “Níl fáilte roimh an RUC” (“The RUC is not welcome”) written underneath. The band apparently took the design from a “PSNI colouring book sent out to schools because they had such poor support from young people in the community” (Ó Hannaidh cited in Leebody 2022). In drawing comparisons between the PSNI and the RUC, these self-proclaimed “Republican Hoods” stirred controversy and, by extension, publicity among certain members of the media. BBC Radio Ulster’s Vinny Hurrell, for instance, reported the event on The Nolan Show by describing “a mural of a burning police car” being accompanied by “chants of get the brits out” before derisively adding that “This is Ireland 2022”. Ó Hannaidh seemed perplexed by the vitriolic media response, arguing:

Anti-police sentiment has been longstanding in the hip-hop community […]. Some people are more worried about a piece of art than the effigies of real politicians hanging off bonfires. We don’t want to be fighting or advocating violence. We want people to be thinking. (Ó Hannaidh cited in Coney 2022)

Interestingly, the way they stirred publicity was to use the tools of the media against the media by creating satirical and critical art. In this case, they sampled Hurrell’s words on the titular track of their second album, Fine Art (2024).

In the film, the media tools on which they rely are music production equipment. The group’s gaining access to the required recording gear is a strong motivating force of the narrative. When that access is denied, the group relies on an icon hip-hop music production machine: the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer. This drum machine was invented by Ikutaro Kakehashi and put into production in 1980. Its intended purpose was simple: if you were a band or an artist in the 1980s without access to a session drummer, the 808 was supposed to provide that missing rhythm accompaniment. The problem Roland faced, which for anyone who has heard the 808 will know, is that it does not sound like a live musician. Its tinny snare, distinctive cowbell, and deep bass drum sound like nothing other than the 808.

Following its commercial failure in the early ‘80s, many units ended up in thrift stores and pawn shops in major cities throughout the US. Young, working class, and predominantly African American musicians with little or no “voice” in mainstream music production rescued these discarded pieces of tech and used them for a different purpose than was originally intended. In this way, hip-hop was born as a musical genre steeped in rebellion. DJ Kool Herc exemplified this when he rebelled against convention in the early 1970s by acoustically isolating the “get down part” of a song – the lively instrumental section – and then alternated between two copies of the same record to extend the lively instrumental into an entire beat: a “break beat”. These beats would provide the foundation on which hip-hop was eventually built. Kneecap’s reliance on the 808 is their acknowledgement of hip-hop as a vehicle to give a rebellious voice to the underrepresented. It also provides a humorous, and likely unintentional response, to Robert Arkins’ line from an earlier Irish musical film, The Commitments (1991): “No one uses synths anymore. It’s back to basics”.

Kneecap, however, is anything but basic. It presents a complex exploration of the political importance of language and the capacity of hip-hop music to give voice to the underrepresented. The fact it does so through a lively sex and drug-laden film makes it all the more enjoyable. It may not always be true to their life, but it is true to many of their experiences as “ceasefire babies”, and it provides a unique generic example of a biopic in real time.