As “get off my lawn” as it sounds, the world misses the time when artists stood for something. They focused more on the quality of their work than the charts. They sought to empower their audience instead of using them as pawns in their feuds. They used their music to make the world better. No one embodied those attributes more than the late great Bob Marley.
Numerous books and documentaries have chronicled the global icon’s short yet well-lived life and career, and now Marley’s journey gets the feature film treatment with Bob Marley: One Love. Starring Kingsley Ben-Adir as the titular subject, One Love dramatizes the events of Marley’s life that followed his decision to organize 1976’s “Smile, Jamaica” concert.
Marley’s legend stands above all legends, but does One Love fare the same among the sea of Marley-based works or other biopics? No, because the ship gets pulled in too many directions.
If the only part of a film that mattered was acting, One Love would flirt with perfection. The pairing of Ben-Adir’s near-flawless turn as Marley and Lashana Lynch’s powerful supporting performance as Rita Marley is the film’s bellcow.
Like his excellent portrayal of Malcolm X in One Night in Miami, Ben-Adir morphs into Marley right before your eyes. You hear Marley the moment he speaks and see Marley in everything, from the way he walks to his energetic performances and recording sessions. Ben-Adir’s mastery of Marley’s infamous charisma is also a joy to watch, but oddly, it receives less screen time than the musical aspect of the role.
Lynch has a better opportunity to show more range and takes advantage of it. She deftly percolates every up and down Rita goes through as part of the beautiful yet tumultuous marriage onto the screen. Her performance reaches another level when paired with Ben-Adir for one of the film’s most tense and arguably best scenes when both parties put all their cards on the table.
Sadly, that’s where the positive vibes end for One Love, with the chief issue being the filmmakers' inability to figure out what they were trying to make. They set out to produce a film about a man with a legacy that casts shadows over the most iconic stars but only allotted an hour and forty-seven minutes to tell it.
One Love starts Marley’s decision to organize the “Smile, Jamaica” concert as the catalyst for everything that follows. Yet, it hardly shows how the concert’s fallout impacted Marley or Jamaica. In reality, it forced him to run for his life and think about his mortality. In the movie, it sets up a regular getaway.
Following that, there’s a shift to focus on the music. However, the film doesn’t provide a backstory, experiences, thought processes, etc., that led to the songs or show how the music impacted the country or world. The same goes for the tour of Africa, which is mentioned often throughout the film but left without even a scene from archival footage to show it happened.
That issue generally extends to Marley as One Love reduces his global impact to making the Exodus album, smoking, and playing soccer. The lack of critical facts, such as Halie Selassie’s influence and the story of Marley’s father, also hurt the film. With all of that considered, it’s safe to wonder if the four screenwriters and director were ever on the same page because One Love never gets to the why regarding Marley’s importance or what we were there to see him do.
While it’s fair to argue the previously mentioned runtime could be the culprit for the film’s faults, those problems could have been averted by either narrowing the scope of the story since it isn’t all-encompassing anyway or extending the length of One Love because Marley is worthy of a 2.5-hour biopic.
Even for a limited look at the life of Marley, One Love has too many holes to fill to rank among the better projects about the cultural force. It’s worth watching Ben-Adir and Lynch go to work, but the indecisiveness behind the movie’s direction is too much to make it a must-see. For a better and more detailed telling of Marley’s story, check out the 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary Marley on Amazon’s Freevee.