The Irishmen: "Kneecap"

With the noble exception of Chappell Roan, our musicians still want to be moviestars, yet very few acts can claim to have achieved that crossover at the exact right moment with the exact right project. The Beatles, of course, whose A Hard Day's Night continues to demonstrate the band's preternatural combination of timing and good judgement. Prince with Purple Rain, certainly. Maybe Supergrass, if the Monkees-style TV show Steven Spielberg reportedly had planned for them had come to fruition in the first phase of their ascendancy. Yet for every one of these musical unicorns, there is a dead horse being flogged somewhere: Vanilla Ice in 1991's Cool as Ice, 1997's sadly unforgettable Spiceworld: The Movie ("they don't just sing"), the already dwindling S Club 7 in 2003's Seeing Double. With the wholly disarming Kneecap, the titular new white hopes of Irish hiphop strive to print their own legend before the truth has had chance to get its trainers on: youthful rabblerousing, inspired by an IRA fugitive father figure (Michael Fassbender in the movie, porting over traits from 2008's Hunger) who insisted his boys watch Westerns on TV from the perspective of the Injuns, prolific effing-slash-jeffing and drug use in adolescence, followed by overnight success only after their music and gigs started being banned for subversion by the powers-that-be. Crucial to the entire project - the music and now the movie - is their insistence on doing much of the above in the Irish language, the line of Da's that stuck with them long enough to find its way into this script being "every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom". (They are a very 21st century phenomenon, looking to speak those words and attain that freedom without having to fire the literal bullets their forefathers did.) The results add up to that rarest of pop-movie beasts: a film that ticks off all the necessary promotional work - replaying the hits, getting those who know nothing of Pitchfork and 6Music up to speed with the story so far - while feeling persistently rebellious and touching on so much else besides. Kneecap has smart, witty, substantial things to say about national and personal identity, intergenerational trauma, even the dwindling revenue stream of today's non-megastar performer. The mystery the critic has to unpick is how a pair of scamps in tracksuits who might otherwise resemble Jedward with eight-pound haircuts, and an older fellow who serves as the pair's MC but looks like a civil servant of some kind, pulled it off.

The solution, it strikes me, is an exceptionally well-integrated script, credited to director Rich Peppiatt and the band, which highlights the boys' evident facility with words - what's already been amply demonstrated on record - within an immensely satisfying and revealing structure. Every last one of these scenes and sidebars forms its own comment on who this act is and where they came from, and a very high percentage is extremely funny indeed. True, some of it is crude, 18-rated, boys-will-be-boys malarkey (misadventures with ketamine, a sex scene where the lovers egg one another on - and get each other off - with Republican slogans and taunts), but there are also wry cracks at the expense of Michael Collins, and - almost unimaginably - a choice sight gag involving an actual kneecapping. Even the dialogue between the film's normies - headed by conflicted teacher turned translator (JJ Ó Dochartaigh) who enters Kneecap lore as the group's cokehead DJ Provai - has a certain irreverent crackle and fizz: "You're like the man who discovered the Beatles," Provai is told by a cop tailing the band, "if the Beatles were shit". Having caught the British tabloids with their trousers down in 2014's documentary One Rogue Reporter (a DVD of which makes a cameo here, perhaps inevitably as a means of drug smuggling), Peppiatt looks to have fully understood the assignment - get an unlikely story on film - while also opening the film up via improvisation and riff: false starts and animated inserts, fastforwarding past the rote (the boys' torture at the hands of a group calling themselves Radical Republicans Against Drugs) to get to the fresher material. He does something especially deft with a tricolored balaclava: a relic of Ireland past, initially co-opted for a sex game, then as a mask and essential item of stagewear (and now, presumably, hot-potato merchandise). Yet Kneecap is never solely about the band: the supporting characterisation is unusually generous, and Peppiatt's old idea of what constitutes good journalism informs the attempt to school us - via radio and TV inserts as much as written drama - as to the state of play in post-millennial Ireland, what leads its kids to pop pills and dream of becoming the voice of a nation. The movie wears its history and politics lightly, but that underlying seriousness of purpose dispels the faint air of Kurupt FM/Goldie Lookin' Chain novelty hanging over this collective. Even so, Kneecap remains by some distance the cheekiest and most surprising film of the summer months; for fullest enjoyment, bunk off something important to see it.

Kneecap is now showing in cinemas across Ireland, and opens in selected UK cinemas from Friday.