Bob Marley’s music can’t rescue ‘One Love’
British actor Kingsley BenAdir has proven himself as an actor to watch in such TV series as “Peaky Blinders,” “The OA,” “High Fidelity” and especially in his take on Malcolm X in Regina King’s standout 2020 film “One Night in Miami.” So his elevation to headline status as pioneering Jamaican reggae vocalist Bob Marley in the biopic “Bob Marley: One Love,” opening Wednesday throughout Houston, is welldeserved. And he’s magnetic as Marley, a performer whose songs heralded one of the most important pop-music movements of the late 20th century. Unfortunately, that music and Ben-Adir — last seen as one of the Kens in “Barbie” — are let down by a by-thenumbers script, one that turns a man who became a messianic figure for some into a stick figure
with dreadlocks.
The film opens in 1976 with Marley at the center of a Jamaican news conference about an upcoming concert he’s planning, one meant to display unity in a country being ripped apart by political violence. Not long after, Marley, his wife, Rita (a captivating Lashana Lynch), and one of aides, Don Taylor (Anthony Welsh), are shot in Marley’s home, a life-shattering event that sends Marley to London, where much of the movie takes place.
But director Reinaldo Marcus Green (“King Richard”), who cowrote the script with Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers and Zach Baylin, can’t avoid the bane of so many biopics, having to cram too much life into too little time. All of it feels rushed and carries less emotional resonance than it should. Marley’s earlier years are handled through a series of flashbacks, including his of a relationship with his white father and his introduction to Rastafarianism, a Jamaicanborn religious movement that forms the foundation for the roots reggae movement that Marley took to the world. Yet little of it packs a punch.
There are so many moments that deserve deeper exploration. For example, while in London, Marley and members of his band venture to a punk club in London to see the Clash. But it’s treated more as a lark than a moment that sparked a Marley song (“Punky Reggae Party”) and recognition by Marley that there were cultural parallels between the outsider status of white British punks and Jamaica’s Black Rastafarians.
But if “Bob Marley: One Love” has two saving graces, it is Marley’s music and Ben-Adir’s performance. One of the best scenes involves the creation of one of his most noteworthy tracks, the surging “Exodus,” and it is riveting. In real life, the song probably didn’t come together as easily as it does in the film, but it’s still a wonderfully vibrant moment in a movie that could use more of them.
Just about everything else involving the music, including James Norton as Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, feels like boilerplate music biopic malack terial. Of course, the suits don’t understand what Marley is about and are shown to be wrong at every turn. Then, of course, there’s Marley’s battle with cancer, which he lost at the too-young age of 36, but the film doesn’t really offer much new here either.
Still, Ben-Adir is adept at capturing Marley’s ecstatic, almost possessed stage presence, and he lends the role a certain depth that the script is missing. Director Green deserves credit for keeping the dialogue squarely rooted in Jamaican English — and not just using it simply as “ya mon” phrasal seasoning — and not utilizing subtitles in standard English. This helps plunge the viewer into Marley’s world.
But this impulse for authenticity, Adair’s performance and Marley’s music — songs that were both sublime and incendiary — deserve to star in a better movie.