Month: July 2024

Rapping their way toward Irish solidarity

Members of the Kneecap hip-hop band are (from left): Liam Og O’Hannaidh (stage name Mo Chara), JJ O’Dochartaigh (DJ Provai) and Naoise O’Carrolean (Moglai Bap). All play themselves in the new film Kneecap. (Photos courtesy of Sony Pictures)

By Richard Ades

Kneecap is a movie about Irish rappers who deliver their rhymes in their native Irish. As such, it can be a lot for American viewers to absorb, especially since it unfolds at a take-no-prisoners pace.

Once you get your bearings, though, writer/director Rich Peppiatt’s debut flick is a blast and a hoot.

The title refers to an actual Northern Ireland hip-hop band that took its name from the painful punishment often meted out by republican enforcers during the period of upheaval known as “The Troubles.” Set in 2019 or so, long after relative peace has arrived, the film purports to be the band’s origin story.

I say “purports” because Peppiatt’s clever script no doubt takes massive liberties with reality. If the story still has an air of authenticity, it’s partly because the band members all play themselves, and they do so with panache and conviction.

The trio’s founding members are Naoise O’Carrolean and Liam Og O’Hannaidh, lifelong friends who rap in their spare time but make their living selling drugs. The final member is JJ O’Dochartaigh, a bored music teacher who becomes involved with Naoise and Liam by pure chance.

But before that happens, a whirlwind prologue efficiently defines the characters and the divided society in which they live.

While Naoise is still a baby, his Catholic parents take him into the woods for a secret baptism ceremony, only to see it interrupted by a hovering military helicopter. Angry at the English- and Protestant-dominated government that he blames for curtailing his rights, the father, Arlo (Michael Fassbinder), becomes a republican activist and eventually fakes his own death to avoid being captured. This leaves Naoise virtually fatherless and forces his mother (Simone Kirby) to play the role of a grieving widow.

Liam is also affected, since Arlo has been a father figure to him. Like Naoise, he grows up into an angry young man who champions the Irish language as an act of rebellion.

Naoise O’Carrolean (left) has a rare meeting with his fugitive father, Arlo (Michael Fassbinder).

Meanwhile, JJ is plodding along, teaching students who don’t seem to be all that interested. When fate brings him into contact with two rappers who share his passion for music and the Irish language—and, it must be said, for drugs—he doesn’t need much prodding to join their band.

It’s a fascinating story, and writer/director Peppiatt tells it in an anarchic, wildly creative style that fits its subject. Watch for “sound waves” to be represented by squiggly lines, or for Irish rhymes to be translated in ever-changing fonts of lettering. And in one of several scenes of drug use, watch as the three hallucinating musicians suddenly morph into Claymation figures.

Raunchiness—in terms of language, nudity and sex—is another of the film’s defining elements. The sex scenes generally involve Liam and Georgia (Jessica Reynolds), the latest in a string of Protestant girlfriends. In an amusing twist, Liam always dates Protestant women because only they can stimulate the anger that apparently is needed to awaken his sex drive.

Though Kneecap takes on serious subjects, including the desire for Irish solidarity and the fight to make their native tongue an official language, the film seldom takes itself seriously. More often, it’s laugh-out-loud funny.

For a debut feature film—or any film, really—it’s quite an achievement.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Kneecap (rated R) opens Aug. 2 in theaters nationwide.

Survivors of conversion therapy tell their stories

Filmmaker Zach Meiners (right, in T-shirt) and former Mormon Elena Joy Thurston both underwent conversion therapy in an attempt to “cure” them of homosexuality. (Photos courtesy of Gravitas Ventures)

By Richard Ades

At the beginning of Conversion, a man tells the story of his first love—and first loss.

At 15, he had a boyfriend whose parents had put him through a doctor’s treatment program in an attempt to convert him to heterosexuality. After classmates discovered the two youths holding hands behind the school, the boyfriend said he was terrified that he’d be sent back into the program.

Later that night, he took his own life.

“Our love killed him,” the man remembers thinking at the time. But, of course, what really killed the boy was society’s problem with homosexuality, as well as the doctor’s attempt to “cure” him through what’s often called “conversion therapy.”

Though this practice is now widely condemned and even illegal in nearly half of U.S. states, thousands of LGBTQ people have been subjected to it down through the years. Three of them tell their stories in Zach Meiners’s new documentary.

One of them, in fact, is Meiners himself, who recalls that he first realized he was different from his male friends when puberty hit and they suddenly became interested in girls. Worried that others might discover he didn’t share their feelings, he started looking for ways to change himself.

Among his stranger experiences with conversion therapy were sessions with a therapist who demanded detailed accounts of his gay fantasies. Meiners eventually began to suspect the therapist was doing this for his own benefit rather than his client’s, as the man often became visibly aroused during their time together.

Dustin Rayburn is a conversion therapy survivor.

Other memories are shared by Dustin Rayburn, whose religious family blamed their child’s sexuality on a “gay demon”; and Elena Joy Thurston, who was a Mormon wife and mother when she realized she had lesbian longings. Though Rayburn and Thurston’s experiences with conversion therapy were very different, in each case someone wrongly tried to blame their gayness on sexual assaults they’d suffered as youths.

Conversion is a heartfelt effort to spread the word about a pseudoscience that has made life exponentially harder for thousands of young people and that has no doubt driven many to attempt suicide. If the film doesn’t have as much impact as it might, it’s partly because similar messages have been delivered by earlier efforts such as Gregory Caruso’s 2022 documentary of the same name and Joel Edgarton’s 2018 drama Boy Erased.

In addition, Meiner’s apparently limited budget shows at times, as when the same still images keep cropping up over and over. The film also weakens itself by occasionally lapsing into sappiness and by spending an inordinate amount of screen time interviewing a former advocate of conversion therapy.

The documentary regains its sense of purpose, however, when it warns that conversion therapy remains a threat. The phony science may disguise itself by using different names and terminology, we’re told, and it may hide in back channels of the internet, but it has never really gone away.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Conversion was released July 2 through VOD and cable outlets.