The three real members of Kneecap play fictionalized versions of themselves, and the gamble pays off because none of them are performing restraint — Naoise Ó Cairealláin and Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh play the group's founding duo as reckless, funny, drug-addled young men with a genuine political conviction buried under the chaos, while JJ Ó Dochartaigh's music teacher character gives the film its most grounded, human throughline. Writer-director Rich Peppiatt shoots the whole thing with the jittery, subtitle-splattered energy of a band's own highlight reel, cutting between English and Irish dialogue in ways that make the language politics part of the joke rather than a lecture.
This is a drug comedy first, with the manic energy of Trainspotting, and a piece of activist cinema second, and the film is smart enough to let the comedy carry the politics rather than the other way around. A sequence involving a rave, a stolen sound system, and a very confused set of paramilitaries is as purely funny as anything in recent comedy, and it doubles as a sharp point about how absurd sectarian tensions can look from just one generation removed.
A band's origin story that turns language politics into the year's funniest drug comedy.
Michael Fassbender shows up in a supporting role as Ó Hannaidh's estranged, IRA-connected father, and the film uses him sparingly enough that his scenes land as gut-punches rather than stunt casting. What's most impressive is how Kneecap manages to be a loving tribute to a specific subculture — West Belfast, the Irish language revival, a very particular strain of Troubles-adjacent gallows humor — while still being legible and hilarious to an audience with zero context for any of it.
Kneecap was written and directed by Rich Peppiatt in his feature debut, produced by Fine Point Films with backing from the BFI, Northern Ireland Screen, Screen Ireland, and TG4. It stars the real members of the Belfast hip-hop trio Kneecap — Naoise Ó Cairealláin, Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh, and JJ Ó Dochartaigh — playing fictionalized versions of themselves, alongside Michael Fassbender in a supporting role. The film is a joint Ireland–United Kingdom production, shot largely in Irish and English, and runs 105 minutes. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2024 as the festival's first Irish-language film.
Kneecap won the NEXT Audience Award at Sundance and swept the Galway Film Fleadh, taking Best Irish Film, the Audience Award, and the Irish Language Feature Film Award. Ireland selected it as its submission for the Best International Feature Oscar. At the 2025 BAFTA Film Awards it earned six nominations, with Peppiatt winning Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director, or Producer. In Ireland, the film had the widest theatrical opening ever for a non-English-language release and became the highest-grossing Irish-language film at the domestic box office, a milestone widely covered as evidence of its crossover reach beyond its niche subject matter.
Critics fell hard for it too: the film sits at a remarkable 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, which by some tallies is the best-reviewed movie of Fassbender's career, and Sony Pictures Classics picked it up for U.S. distribution with Curzon handling the UK release. Part of the film's charge comes from how closely it tracks the real band's public life — Kneecap has spent the years since making headlines for its own politics offstage, including a UK High Court ruling that the government acted unlawfully in withholding a music-export grant from the group over its views. That real-world friction has only sharpened the film's satire in retrospect, making its jokes about state suspicion of the band feel less like exaggeration than reportage.
