Streaming: Kneecap and the best hip-hop movies

The Belfast rappers’ riotous semi-biopic adds an Irish-language twist to a sub-genre that ranges from 8 Mile and Straight Outta Compton to Patti Cake$

The list of hip-hop acts who have starred in their own biopic is a short one, and it has perhaps its unlikeliest entry in Kneecap. The spiky Belfast trio’s pro-republican protest rap – much of it pointedly in the Irish language – has made them cult figures on home turf, and comedian turned film-maker Rich Peppiatt’s ebullient film, simply titled Kneecap, aims to do the same internationally. Avoiding a lot of self-important biographical tropes as it depicts their scrappy rise to fame and lays out their blunt political principles, it could easily be mistaken for fiction, with its knockabout tone and heightened comedy, though that just helps it as a mythmaking exercise. As in much of rap culture, being a little larger than life is the point.

In the ranks of hip-hop cinema, Kneecap is certainly sui generis – as is the band itself – though its emphasis on hard-up roots and streetwise authenticity of voice still put it in line with more conventional examples of the genre. Textured and empathetic, Curtis Hanson’s 2002 film 8 Mile exercised considerable less humour in lightly fictionalising the Detroit trailer-park beginnings of rap star Eminem, who plays a version of himself (here dubbed “B-Rabbit”) with rather more grit and humanity than anyone might have expected at the time, steering the film out of vanity-project territory. His protege Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson wasn’t nearly so lucky in his own thinly disguised semi-biopic, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, improbably directed by Jim Sheridan, which was all blank macho posturing and steely brand management.

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