Bob Marley: One Love

Reinaldo Marcus Green’s film about Bob Marley covers a couple of years in the late 1970s, from a shooting at the singer’s house in Kingston to the making of Exodus in London. Rita Marley and Cedella Marley are among the producers, and four screenwriters are credited: Frank E. Flowers, Zach Baylin, Green and Terence Winter. That is a lot of hands and a good deal of family, and it shows. It is a list of the things Marley did, set to the songs he wrote, and the man doing them stays out of reach for 104 minutes.

It starts well. Kingston in 1976 has two parties and a lot of guns, Marley has agreed to play a free concert for peace, and gunmen come to the house two nights before it. Green stages the attack quickly and without music, and the concert that follows, with Marley wounded and singing anyway, is the best sequence here. Robert Elswit shoots it at night, hot light on the stage and the crowd a dark mass beyond, and Kingsley Ben-Adir moves through the songs like a man who has decided the bullet is somebody else’s problem. We sat forward for this, and a film that had opened like a thriller seemed about to become one.

It does not. In London the film settles into the recording studio, which is where music biopics go to die. Somebody plays a bass line, somebody else looks up, and a song we all know is born in front of us as if by accident. Pamela Martin and Nick Houy cut the years together as montage, a chorus over a tour, a verse over a newspaper, and Kris Bowers’s score sits under the records without getting in their way. We were bored by the second studio scene, and then cross about being bored, because these are some of the best songs anyone made in that decade and the film treats them as a checklist.

Ben-Adir has done the work. He has the walk, the swaying shoulders, the accent that softens for Rita and hardens for money men, and on stage he is convincing enough that we stopped comparing. What he has not been given is a scene in which Marley is wrong about something. The script allows him a temper twice, once at his manager Don Taylor (Anthony Welsh) and once at the world, and both times it hurries him back to serenity. A man several people here have good reason to be angry with appears as a prophet with a football.

Lashana Lynch is the reason to stay. Her Rita has been shot at, moved countries and watched her husband’s girlfriend (Umi Myers, as Cindy Breakspeare) arrive, and Lynch plays it as pressure building rather than a list of grievances. When she lets go, in a row we will not describe, it is the one scene in which two people say what they actually think, and it moved us more than the rest of the picture put together. Then the film cuts to the next song.

The rest get costumes rather than parts. James Norton’s Chris Blackwell is a sympathetic man in linen. Tosin Cole’s Tyrone Downie and Aston Barrett Jr.’s Family Man Barrett stand at the edges and rarely get a scene. Anna B. Sheppard’s clothes, the denim and knitted tams and football shirts, are right, and Chris Lowe’s house on Hope Road, all open doors and people on the stairs, is the film’s most believable place. The flashbacks to a boy in a burning cane field are its least believable, and they keep coming back.

Green and Baylin made King Richard together in 2021, another authorised family portrait, and it let its hero be exhausting, vain and occasionally right. This one is more frightened of its subject. Nobody here lacks sincerity, but meaning to honour a man is not the same as showing him to us.

If you want the songs, they are here and sung with care; watch at home with the volume up and let the montages pass. If you want to know why the man on the posters mattered, the film assumes you already do.