The best music biopic of the year is now on Netflix and has all the energy of a real concert film

You don’t have enough Irish-language hip-hop in your life. That’s just a simple fact. But thankfully, Netflix has added the most interesting and unique music biopic of the year to help fill in that gap for you. 

Kneecap follows the semi-mythical origins of the Irish-language rap group of the same name. The film starts out centering on two teenagers, Liam and Naoise, living in Belfast in the late 2010s. Naoise’s father, Arlo (Michael Fassbender), a former IRA member who went into hiding, taught the boys Irish at a young age, but while he did it to preserve some sense of national identity in the boys, they mostly use it to stick it to any authority they can find. Somewhere in the middle of all their teenage shenanigans they run into a music teacher named JJ, who finds out that Liam writes songs and suggests the three of them form a hip-hop group. 

Kneecap zips through most of this origin story with some hilarious dialogue and excellent performances by the main trio, who are all the real band members portraying themselves. But where Kneecap really shines is once the group starts putting on shows. When they’re onstage, the movie practically turns into a concert film. The trio is absolutely electric when they’re performing, making it easy to see how Kneecap caught on in real life. The music itself is loud, punkish, and propulsive, and director Rich Peppiatt captures the clear natural stage presence of all three members and translates the kinetic momentum and energetic frenzy of their concerts to the screen perfectly. 

While it’s no surprise that the movie’s musical sequences are incredible, the most astonishing part of casting the real-life musicians is that they can act, too. The performances are surprisingly nuanced and incredibly effective, but dodge the sappy sentimentality that sometimes infects more traditional music biopics. Avoiding this kind of cloying adoration for subjects of the movie also helps Kneecap be about more than just the group, too. As the movie makes clear, part of the reason the trio started Kneecap was as a reaction to the disappearance of Irish-language culture. The movie is careful to underline why exactly this matters, and how Kneecap themselves helped lead a small revitalization of the language, which makes both the movie and the group even more impressive. 

Truthfully, any one of these elements, from the excellent acting to the fantastic musical performances to the fascinating points about Irish culture, would have been enough to make Kneecap worth catching up with on Netflix. But altogether, it not only adds up to a great film, but to one of the most impressive and unique movies of the entire year. 

Kneecap is now streaming on Netflix.