Bob Marley: One Love review – a low-calorie music bio

An ultra-conventional jukebox biog where a celebration of the music trumps a true exploration of the man.

They really should’ve called this one “Redemption Song” in that it’s a film that works double-time to file down and buff the rough edges of the late roots-reggae sage, Bob Marley. Reinaldo Marcus Green’s follow-up to his likeable award season fixture, King Richard, is hagiography 101, with the majority of its focus trained on the fruits of its charismatic subject’s creative genius and with zero interest in getting to the juicy particulars of his legend status.

It’s a biographical film where, to ask “why?” in regard to Marley’s sometimes obscurely-motivated actions would risk placing him in an ambiguous light. And so we instead trot through a series of highly manicured and stage-managed Wiki hit points and pause every few minutes for a musical interlude. Yes, there are pleasures to be had from sitting in a cinema and hearing Bob Marley hits blasted at 100 decibels, but you can do that at home with a decent record player and even with some on-brand recreational drugs to hand.

Kingsley Ben-Adir dons dreads and an unduly slick goatee to play the big man himself, and while he does well to nail the thick Jamaican patois and Marley’s rousing delivery of both lyrics and speech, it never feels more than cosplay, particularly down to the unfortunate fact that he simply looks nothing like the real Marley. Lashana Lynch provides both emotional energy and dramatic heft as his semi-estranged wife Rita Marley, yet a trio of big, important dialogue scenes between the pair lack the necessary context and detail to truly hit home.

In many ways, with One Love Marley has been cynically Bohemian Rhapsodised, in that the overall structure is laid out early on (in fact, it’s spelled out with an inter-title) with the intended climax being his career defining One Love Peace Concert, held in Trenchtown in 1978, orchestrated a view to healing the gaping political rifts that had plunged Jamaica into factional violence (with Marley himself the victim of a shooting). That the film has chosen to emphasise Marley’s heroism and political import before it has even started puts, if not a downer on proceedings, then it certainly negates any sense of surprise.

And because the film is so loath to address anything that might be deemed controversial in Marley’s life, it leaves things open for the viewer to speculate in bad faith. His almost-total disregard for his children is addressed indirectly by giving exclusive weight to his self-imposed exile from Jamaica (in London, away from his kids) and the vast touring schedule that came as a result of the massive success of his 1977 LP, Exodus. An outburst of violence is framed as a noble bolstering of personal ideals – specifically his desire to tour Africa.

The best scene in the film by some way is the seemingly impromptu moment that the track ‘Exodus’ was written in his London home, an invigorating shot of raw performance energy that’s thankfully shorn of an “angle”. Yet there’s just this incessant focus on the already well-known matter of his genius, including the petty one-upmanship of getting to dunk on the Island Records head of marketing after signing off the supposedly-alienating album cover for Exodus.

The question of his untimely death at the age of 36 is dealt with in a superficial way, with the makers trying hard to frame his decision to not have the acral lentiginous melanoma on his right big toe amputated as entirely logical within his creed and headspace. To have saved his own life would have been to renege on the teaching and beliefs that he poured into his music, and so his death was, apparently, a mere continuation of his life’s work.

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Published 8 Feb 2024

Tags: Reinaldo Marcus Green