JOINT SESSION

Opening this weekend:

Kneecap--The title refers to a west Belfast rap trio whose members perform in Irish, as in the Irish language. The members play themselves in the film--two youths, who go by the stage names "Mo Chara" and "Móglai Bap," and an older music teacher, JJ aka "DJ Próvai," who performs in a balaclava to hide his identity both from his employers and from his wife.

The group's bristling, furious, insolently funny music gets them in trouble, not only with the police and  politicians but with scuzzy local gangsters, the Orange Order and their own families. Even the pro-Irish language activists react with distate; they don't want the mother tongue associated with this sort of profanity, obscenity, drug use and anti-Brit sentiment. But the music also, of course, finds an enthusiastic audience.

The trailer calls the film, set in 2019 and directed by Rich Peppiatt from a script he wrote with the stars, a "mostly true story." To what extent the adverb in that phrase is strained, I can't say, though the publicity seems to suggest that this is a tall-tale version of the truth.

What I can say is that the movie is irresistible. The three stars are extremely endearing, and hold their own onscreen alongside veterans like Michael Fassbender as Móglai Bap's father and Josie Walker as a forbidding detective. Peppiatt's direction is fast and graphically playful but never merely slick; there's always warmth in the wit. And it's all driven forward by that marvelous music.

I realize that I come to Kneecap as a total outsider; most of the cultural references were opaque to me, and if there's another, darker angle from which this story can be seen, I'm certainly not in a position to recognize it. Things get a bit melodramatic toward the end, but again, the movie never really tries to claim that it's a documentary. Taken on its own terms, it's a delight.

There's also an irony built into the movie's language: the beautifully-spoken Irish is subtitled; the English dialogue is not, and was thus much harder for my Yank ear to follow. Maybe they should have subtitled both languages for the U.S. market, one in orange lettering, the other in green.