Opiniões dos críticos

With its rambunctious spirit, running jokes about ketamine, and a prominently displayed pair of pallid buttocks daubed with bluntly anti-British sentiment, the fictionalised origin story of real-life Irish-language rap group Kneecap (who play themselves) probably won’t be for everyone. But the combination of the profane and the political, the riotous humour and punchy editing makes for one of the more energising viewing experiences of the year, and possibly one of the funniest.

Kneecap argues the difference between language as archival work and language as something radical and alive.

Kneecap is helter-skelter and often hilarious – a scene in which the group accidentally take ketamine before a show is particularly hysterical. Most impressively of all, Peppiatt captures the raw power of a great rap song. Hard-punching and cheerfully riotous, the film directs a well-placed kick at the nether regions to anyone who insists music, politics and cinema cannot mix.

Rich Peppiatt folds boisterous animations and plot strands galore... into Kneecap’s irresistible rise to fame. Holding everything together is a wry political coherence, a loose but fierce conviction that working-class people with an attitude and talent can stand up and say something.

Kneecap is ultimately a film about the importance of retaining an indigenous language, how the use of a country’s ancient native tongue is not only an act of defiance but also a way of retaining a cultural heritage and identity. That it does this without a hint of worthiness, just maximum irreverence, is what makes Kneecap such a joy.

Music-filled and spikily edited, “Kneecap” finds rude wit and edge to underscore its needle-drop righteousness; that it sustains its level so exuberantly is remarkable, especially considering how hit-and-miss these self-mythologizing projects often are.

The film’s style is frenetic and propulsive, profane and provocative, peppered with jokey asides, stylistic flourishes (slow-mo, animation), and pulled along by a snarky voiceover... It feels local and authentic. Some viewers might need footnotes. The film barrels on without you.

Its lodestar in this regard is “Trainspotting,” though “Kneecap” feels forced by comparison. Good thing the Kneecap boys are genuinely unhinged and amusingly louche. They bring a nerve that offsets the film’s cringe attempts at badassery.

It’d be easy in a film as larky as Kneecap to let its political threads between past and present fray and snap in the flurry of self-aware jokes... But the script, penned by writer-director Rich Peppiatt and his three stars, zeroes in on three relationships... Through them, and beyond the jokiness, a poignant picture emerges of a young generation trying to shake off their city’s violent past, cling to the good bits and reconcile with each other.

In its own sweet way, Kneecap is just like nearly every other music-focused rags-to-riches movie ever made. Think: The Jazz Singer (1927) but with a lot more ketamine; 8 Mile but set not long after an extended, bloody civil war had ended; or A Hard Day’s Night where every other word begins with the letter c.

What’s ultimately convincing about this film, providing the patina of cultural importance that surely swayed all of its public UK and Éire backers, is how unafraid and uncensored it is about all of Kneecap the group’s provocations, linking to how hip-hop globally and in its short history lives in the interstices of many similar trigger points.

It’s no surprise that Kneecap has rubbed unionist politicians and right-wing newspapers up the wrong way, but this will only make the band and their fans more defiant. As the film ends you get the sense that, for a band like Kneecap – a biopic is only the beginning.