Drug-fuelled punk hip-hop meets virulent Irish nationalism in this origin story of the Belfast band Kneecap.   It’s so weird and wild and transgressive it’s hard to believe it’s essentially true. 

But it is.  It starts shortly after the Northern Ireland Peace Agreement of 1998, when we are introduced to two young lads of the ‘ceasefire generation’, Liam and Naoise (pronounced ‘Neesha’.)

They are born into a community with long memories of the manifold wrongs visited on the Irish by the British, especially the suppression of the native Irish language.  In an opening scene that could come from an Irish fairytale, a woman carries a baby through darkling woods towards a small gathering that includes her husband and a priest, who is to baptise the child in the forbidden Gaelic.  Suddenly a storm of dazzling light and noise and wind looms overheard, shattering the spiritual vibe: a British military helicopter has sussed them out!  Liam’s voiceover comments:  what chance did we have?  For a moment I feared he meant there’d be a bloodbath that turns him into an IRA avenger, but fortunately this offence by the Saxon overlords was only symbolically destructive, and what he meant by that rhetorical question was what chance of not growing up as passionately Fenian as their parents and the rest of the community. 

Naoise’s father Arlo, who HAS been an IRA avenger (or so the RUC* alleges), has taught Liam and Naoise as little boys to speak the Gaelic, telling them that ‘every word of Irish spoken is a bullet for Irish freedom’.  For him and his wife Dolores, speaking their ancestral tongue is an act of political and cultural defiance. 

At some point in their childhoods Arlo’s past as a republican paramilitary catches up with him and he goes into hiding, faking his death to fool the British and the RUC.  This has a devastating effect on the family:  Dolores becomes a depressed recluse and Naoise turns to drug-dealing and petty crime.  He and Liam become, by their own admission, ‘low-life scum’. 

One night, Liam is arrested at a druggy party. He refuses to speak English to the police, forcing them to bring in an Irish-speaking interpreter.  This is JJ Ó Dochartaigh, a music teacher at an Irish-language school.  He helps Liam avoid charges and pockets Liam’s notebook which he suspects may contain incriminating evidence. 

It does, but it also contains Liam’s poetic jottings, all in Irish.  JJ tries them out with hip-hop beats, and likes the result. 

JJ too is a committed Gaelic speaker.  He and his wife try to speak it exclusively between themselves and they belong to a group that pushes for political support of the language.   He’s frustrated by the archaic content of the Irish language courses at his school, where the kids are drilled in saying things like ‘Padraic went to the bog to cut turf’.  (‘What’s turf?’ one bored student asks.)  You’d really grab the kids’ interest with Irish hip-hop, he figures, and persuades Liam and Naoise to start up a band with himself as DJ, as he’s got access to the necessary music tech.  And so it begins.

At this point I should mention that all three of them play themselves.  They adopt stage names:  Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh becomes ‘Mo Chara’, Naoise Ó Cairealláin becomes ‘Móglaí Bap’ and JJ Ó Dochartaigh becomes ‘DJ Próvaí’.  I can’t remember what the boys’ nicknames mean, but ‘DJ Provai’ is provocative; a ‘Provie’ is a member of the notoriously violent Provisional IRA.  JJ wears their signature balaclava to hide his identity during gigs.   Even more provocative is calling the band ‘Kneecap’, after the infamous punishment technique used by paramilitaries in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

(Incidentally, I had to copy and paste those real Irish names from the movie websites because I don’t have a Gaelic keyboard!)

And they’re off.  Their songs are abrasive, their gigs are rowdy, drug-fuelled and lawless.  The three band members psych themselves up with ketamine and cocaine and throw free samples to the crowd.  Bootleg smartphone recordings get round.  Kneecap attracts the attention of the authorities and also of a group of thugs calling themselves Radical Republicans Against Drugs, who threaten violence against them for making drugs look cool, but turn out not to be as high-minded about social welfare as their name suggests. 

Kneecap is not your typical musical biopic.  It was directed by Richard Peppiatt, and it didn’t surprise me to learn that he came to the project straight from making their music videos.  He does a good enough job with the necessary expository backstory bits, but you get the impression he can’t wait to do the fun stuff:  the hallucinatory camerawork when they’re off their faces; the Keystone Cops pace of the hilarious chase sequence that ensues when Naoise blunders into a group of Orangemen practising their marching routine, nicks their mace and runs off with it. 

I’d say more than half of it is in Irish, with subtitles that scribble themselves all over the screen so fast you can’t always keep up.  There were times I couldn’t make out what they were saying at all, the absence of subtitles being the only indicator that it wasn’t Irish but heavily-accented English. 

Kneecap reminded me of Trainspotting with its theme of wild-Celtic-lads mayhem.  In a way it’s even more transgressive than the latter because Trainspotting at least depicted the downside of hard drug addiction.  Here, it doesn’t seem to affect the band’s upward trajectory, and while DJ Provai worries a bit at first about how his behaviour might damage his respectable teaching career and his nice marriage, in the end he doesn’t seem to care.

Kneecap is described as a ‘fictionalised’ version of the band’s story, although to what extent the bad boy stuff has been exaggerated is hard to determine.  Googling reveals plenty more about the band’s numerous controversies and antics, all ‘fully provoked and relished’, in the words of one commentator. 

A part of me disapproved of Kneecap’s glorying in drugs and violence, while the rest of me found it exhilarating and funny.  It’s certainly never boring. 

Michael Fassbender plays the fugitive father Arlo O Caireallain.  Simone Kirby is Naoise’s mother Dolores, Arlo’s grass widow.  These are the only two previously familiar faces.   

• The Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Northern Ireland police force long dominated by the British-leaning Protestant ascendancy.  Since the peace accords the government of Northern Ireland has tried to make it more inclusive across the religious and cultural divide, with limited success.