Kingsley Ben-Adir

On stage in Bob Marley: One Love (2024), Kingsley Ben-Adir has the swaying shoulders and the walk, but he is not forever asking us to notice them. He moves through the songs with enough conviction that we stop checking the resemblance. We sat forward during the early concert because he made Marley's determination to perform despite the danger convincing. This is precise, committed acting in a film we cannot recommend.

Before the film leads, there was supporting television work, including Dr Marcus Summer in Vera, a part he played from 2014 to 2018. Our liking for that programme rests chiefly on Brenda Blethyn, with the rest of the cast too often short of things to do. Malcolm X in One Night in Miami... (2020) was the breakthrough, bringing vulnerability to a figure familiar from public life. Basketball Ken in Barbie (2023) is a useful exception to that casting in historical roles. His work on Marley included language coaches and family input, preparation that can be heard in the finished performance.

Listen to how his accent softens for Rita and hardens for the money men. That gives the conversations more life than a fixed impersonation would, and Lashana Lynch supplies much of the marriage's fire. Director Reinaldo Marcus Green gives him his strongest stretch in the early concert, with Robert Elswit lighting the stage hot and keeping the crowd dark beyond it.

The trouble comes when the screenplay has to let Marley be difficult. It gives Ben-Adir brief flashes of temper, then hurries him back to serenity, without allowing a scene in which Marley is wrong. The resulting smoothness is a real limitation, however much of it belongs to the writing, and his command of the voice cannot make up for it. We would like to see him play someone the screenplay is prepared to dislike.