Review: 'Bob Marley: One Love' barely scratches the surface of the reggae legend's fascinating life
If you know nothing about Bob Marley, the legendary reggae musician and Jamaican activist, the biographical drama “Bob Marley: One Love” will teach you that much and maybe a few timeline details — but anyone with knowledge of Marley’s complicated life will feel like major sections are glossed over.
The movie primarily centers on the last five years of Marley’s life, from 1976 to 1981 — with abundant flashbacks to his childhood. The main story starts with Marley (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir) planning a concert, called “Smile Jamaica,” designed to be a respite from the bitter and often political campaign at the time. Both sides viewed Marley and the concert with suspicion, each thinking Marley supports the other.
Two days before the show, gunmen — to this day, it’s never been determined whose side they were on — snuck into Marley’s Kingston home and started shooting. Marley was grazed by a couple of bullets, his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch) was shot in the head but survived (a doctor explains that her dreadlocks kept the bullet from reaching her brain), and his manager, Don Taylor (), took six bullets and survived. Bob and Rita performed at “Smile Jamaica” as scheduled.
The violence, however, left its mark on the Marley family, and they fled Jamaica. Rita took the kids to stay with family in Delaware, while Bob and some of his band, The Wailers, relocated to London, where the head of Island Records, Chris Blackwell (James Norton), set them up in a studio. It’s there that Marley experimented with British rock, blues and soul, bending them to accompany his reggae sounds to create what some consider his greatest album, “Exodus.”
Four writers are credited with the screenplay — Terence Winter (“The Wolf of Wall Street”) and Frank E. Flowers (“Metro Manila”) in one pairing, Zach Baylin and director Reinaldo Marcus Green (who collaborated on “King Richard”) in another. The script drops little trivia bombs along the way, with such minutiae as the Island Records marketing guy (Michael Gandolfini) objecting to the album cover of “Exodus,” because Marley’s face wasn’t on it.
The deep stuff about Marley’s relationship with Rita? Even in the one major argument we’re shown, we barely scratch the surface of the tensions within the marriage. (A salient fact not mentioned in the film: Of the Marleys’ 11 children, six of them were born to women outside the marriage.) Before the movie gets too close to anything uncomfortable or less than legendary about Marley, someone notices the bloody mess in his toe — the first hint of the melanoma that took his life in 1981.
This is the third straight biopic Green has directed — “King Richard,” with Will Smith as Venus and Serena Williams’ dad, and “Joe Bell,” starring Mark Wahlberg as a guilt-ridden dad walking across the country, were the others — and maybe he should stop for awhile. He certainly should, before making another biography of a musician, watch the 2007 spoof “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” as a reminder not to step into every cliche in the genre as he does here.
Whatever is worth preserving in “Bob Marley: One Love” comes from the performances, both acting and musical. Ben-Adir, whose resume includes playing Malcolm X (in “One Night in Miami…”) and a Ken (in “Barbie”), finds Bob Marley’s questing spirit, and Lynch (“Captain Marvel,” “The Woman King”) shows Rita to be his rock and consigliere. And the music — sometimes sung by Ben-Adir, but usually Marley’s originals — is untouchable.
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‘Bob Marley: One Love’
★★
Opens Wednesday, February 14, at theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for marijuana use and smoking throughout, some violence and brief strong language. Running time: 104 minutes.