The final credits of this Bob Marley biopic feature shots of his pōwhiri and Western Springs concert in 1979, less than a year after his cancer diagnosis and two years before his death. They are part of a set of real Marley images in a collage that doesn’t really help what’s gone before. It just reminds that the actual Marley was shorter, wirier and rather more electric in a couple of seconds of on-stage performance than he has been in the preceding 100 minutes.
He’s played mostly by the taller, broader Kingsley Ben-Adir in a bit of It-Guy casting – Adir played Basketball Ken in Barbie. You do wonder whose hair he’s borrowed (Reggae Ken?) and if the US producers thought, “Well, he was good in Gandhi.”
You will also wonder why all the Jamaican characters speak in an often-impenetrable patois. For authenticity? In a supposed mass-audience biopic after those on Freddie Mercury, Elton John and Whitney Houston?
Well, Marley sang his lyrics in easily comprehensible English. Maybe he wanted his message to get through. Here, American director Reinaldo Marcus Green, in his second authorised patriarch picture after King Richard, about the Williams’ sisters’ dad, doesn’t seem to think it’s important.
His dramatisation of music’s second-most important Bob, and one of rock’s highest-earning dead people, feels like legend-polishing and merchandising. Two of Marley’s many children and his widow Rita – a singer in his vocal backing group the I Threes – are listed among the producers. The messiness of the Marley marriage is tidied up considerably and Bob becomes a doting dad to a brood he seems to see hardly ever. Though near the end, there’s a scene of him strumming Redemption Song by the outdoor fireside at his Kingston mansion. His sweet smiling children emerge to sit around him, like Jamaica’s very own von Trapps.
Other jarring stage musical touches creep in, too, including groan-worthy music cues (especially with the use of No Woman, No Cry) and a soundtrack that likes to coat the Marley melodies in big-string major key bombast.
The film attempts psychological profundity about Marley’s absent English father involving a pith-helmeted figure on horseback repeatedly pursuing him as a child through burning cane fields, only for the rider to turn out to be Rastafarian figurehead Haile Selassie.
That’s not something you get in every rock biopic, but there’s plenty we’ve seen before. Like meetings with record company guys whose job in biopics is to misunderstand the misunderstood geniuses and insist that selling some records would be nice, especially when presented with a project that its creators believe will change the world.
The film has James Norton as Island Records boss Chris Blackwell then doesn’t do much with him. Elsewhere, there seems to be some score-settling between the Marley estate and Bob Marley & the Wailers’ manager Don Taylor.
Starting in 1976, the film concentrates on the post-breakthrough Marley, when, as some French guy playing a human headline generator at a party says, he’s become a “Third World Superstar”. Then it’s his attempted assassination in Jamaica before an escape to England, where Bob and crew encounter some actual crazy baldheads at a gig by the Clash, before recording the Exodus album. The Exodus segment, and especially the depiction of how the title track came to be, is one of the film’s most inspired touches. It’s also a reminder that many bands that came after owe much of their careers to that song, and its bassline. Elsewhere, a flashback to Bob and his fellow young Wailers Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer – invisible in the rest of the film – recording the ska hit Simmer Down in 1963 just makes you wish this concentrated more on those nascent days. If you’re a One Love greatest hits collection kind of Marley fan, you might learn something. Otherwise, it’s the life of the Third World Superstar getting a third-rate screen treatment.
Rating out of 5: ★★
Bob Marley: One Love directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green is in cinemas now.
