‘Bob Marley: One Love’ review: Well, it’s no Redemption Song

Kingsley Ben-Adir plays one of music’s all-time greats in Bob Marley: One Love, a flat biopic that isn’t going to be all right for most.

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Especially in the years following the success(?) of Bohemian Rhapsody, music biopics have become a dime a dozen. If you go to your local theater, or if you turn on the television to any number of streaming services, you’re likely to find cinematic retellings of the lives and legacies of artists such as Elvis Presley, Elton John, Whitney Houston, Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, David Bowie, Tupac Shukur, and Aretha Franklin, to name only a select few, as well as groups like Motley Crue, N.W.A., The Runaways, and the list goes on and on and on. Even this year’s Oscars race can’t escape the music biopic with Bradley Cooper’s Maestro proving to be one of the ceremony’s most distinguished titles. And that’s not to mention all the ones currently in the early stages of production or pre-production, of which there are seemingly too many to count. 

Suffice it to say, the music biopic genre is here to stay (at least, until people stop showing up). And yet most of them fail to reflect or honor the integrity, authenticity, magnetism, or radicalism of their central subject(s). But that’s not exactly what troubles Bob Marley: One Love from King Richard director Reinaldo Marcus Green, who delivers a respectful, if not exceptionally probing, big-screen exploration of the last years of the defining reggae superstar singer of his time — and, arguably, even today. 

“Are you ready for Bob Marley and The Wailers?”

Purposely eschewing select stereotypes that audiences have grown to expect from this familiar music-filled gene, including the typical Wikipediaifcation of an artist’s career and shying away from a linear, straightforward presentation of the late musician’s tragically short life, One Love seems more aligned with the withstanding aspirations of its central subject, at least initially. But it’s only a matter of time before the movie’s slippery structure collapses under a building series of cliches and narrative tropes that were only hiding at first, waiting to present themselves in full. 

The film takes place primarily between 1976 and 1978 with Kingsley Ben-Adir (One Night in Miami, Barbie) as Marley himself, as he becomes a political activist for peace and prosperity. Which will ultimately result in the making of his most iconic and well-known album, 1977’s revered Exodus. One Love aims not exclusively to tell a point-by-point account of Marley’s life story but rather to tell us the foundational elements that shaped his persisting thesis on music, art, and existence.

We see Marley targeted (and almost assassinated), as well as scrutinized, searched, and questioned. We see the musician’s efforts to provide concerts that stirred the soul and spoke truth to power, and how the creation of Marley’s greatest album laid the seeds for what would become his cathartic awakening at life’s great meaning. The idea of exploring the final and most meaningful years of Marley’s life makes practical sense, but there’s an odd sense of lacking in the film’s final presentation. For as much as the movie tries to avoid being bound to familiar notes and story rhythms, it can help but play a familiar tune once it’s all said and done.

“Reggae is the people’s music.”

While there’s certainly a vibrancy to be felt in the movie’s periodical musical beats, not counting the clunky efforts to reference famous hits like “Three Little Birds” into otherwise dramatic beats, Bob Marley: One Love can’t help but fall prey to sentimalized and stodgy flashback sequences that are meant to show how our subject finds meaning in reflection but only appear to feel like a mandatory inclusion of notable segments in the artist’s life. They lack honesty and sincerity; they play like performative efforts to incorporate moments that they assume audiences expect to see. 

There’s a freedom in allowing us to only see a fraction of an artist’s life, as it should give us more time to let their story breathe and feel more grounded and ingrained to a life taken from us far too soon. Certainly, Ben-Adir does his part to make this role seem believable and soulful. While he doesn’t especially look like the late Marley, notably with a dreadlock wig that looks like something you would see in an SNL parody, the actor has no problem embodying his fervent essence.

Ben-Adir’s performance is as warmly passionate as it is contemplatively resonate, and the talented performer is aided immensely by Lashana Lynch’s invigorated work as Rita Marley, Marley’s back-up singer and long-suffering romantic partner. They share an on-screen relationship that isn’t always able to explore the complexities of their personal and professional coupling, but the performances earnestly attempt to play it vigorously. But their work only highlights how phony the rest of the movie can feel. 

“You can’t separate the music and the message.”

One Love suffers from a screenplay that feels disconnected with itself, with four credited screenwriters and a nagging sense that two or more of them are trying to do different things at once. Terence Winter and Frank E. Flowers, who share a story credit along with a writing one, perhaps were aiming to make something more grounded and compact, allowing us to see how the formation of such a foundational album resulted in Marley becoming the final and truest version of himself. But then you have Green and Zach Baylin, who also wrote King Richard, attached, and there’s a sense that, much like that well-meaning but flawed film, the storytellers are valuing sentimentality over truthfulness.

That’s not to say that a movie needs to be wholly true to be worthwhile; there are certainly plenty of books and documentaries out there for Marley fans to explore the shortened life of this pivotal musical icon. But One Love can become sorely corny when it tries to weave in leadened flashbacks that not only seem unnecessary but also lessen the story’s impact.

The bottom line.

Green’s film is at its best when it lets us see Marley for what he was: a complicated man but an immensely talented and generation-defying radical performer who only continues to reverberate throughout history with his desire to speak to everyone as one and unify a fractured and divided world. Whether such a notion is fateful or fallacy doesn’t matter much to Marley.

His desire was to spread that hopeful tune, and — for his abbreviated time on Earth, at least — make people feel like such a dream could become a reality. Alas, when it comes to Bob Marley: One Love, fiction outweighs fact, and even if one were to allow love over hate to conquer your heart, you can’t help but feel underwhelmed by the potential for greatness that’s lost in favor of dull conformity, the actual antithesis to what made Marley so influential.

Marley was a lot of things, but inauthentic wasn’t one of them. He was a man of the people, and he know how to give people what they wanted to hear. Unfortunately, Bob Marley: One Love, like so many other lifeless music biopics, simply doesn’t.

Bob Marley: One Love is now playing in theaters. Watch the trailer here.

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Images courtesy of Paramount Pictures. Read more articles by Will Ashton here.