Bob Marley: One Love

Select a historical icon, find a slightly more attractive actor to play said icon, and retell their life story. If the last 10 or so years in film history is any indication, biopics, thanks to the built-in audience of their subjects, sell movie tickets. In their greatest success stories, those tickets also go to non-fans, introducing subjects to a whole new audience.

Reinaldo Marcus Green has already helmed one such success story, 2021’s King Richard, which won Will Smith an Oscar for his portrayal of Richard Williams, Venus and Serena’s coach and father. Yet Green’s latest project, Bob Marley: One Love, doesn’t feel primed for the same results. The film doesn’t introduce the legendary reggae pioneer to a new generation so much as it caters to his existing fans. Instead of portraying Marley’s life from beginning to end, the director focuses on a particularly successful – and fraught – two-year period of his life, marked by an assassination attempt and chart-topping albums. It’s an understandable era to focus on. The only problem? Green expects you to know most of it going in.

The film starts with some dreaded text exposition: “Bob Marley rose from the humblest beginnings,” the screen reads. Viewers don’t see any of that, however. Instead, the film jumps directly to 1976 Kingston, Jamaica, where Marley (Ben-Adir), already a star signed to Chris Blackwell’s (Norton) influential Island Records, is preparing to perform at peace concert Smile Jamaica. The concert was meant to quell political violence in the midst of a bitter election season, and Bob’s wife, Rita (Lynch), implores him not to play the show due to the risk of further bloodshed. An attempt on Bob’s life, which severely injures Rita and Bob’s manager, Don Taylor (Welsh), follows shortly after, forcing Bob to send his family to live with his mother in Delaware and escape with his band to London. The severity of the situation is clear, but starting the film at this moment – without establishing Marley’s motivating spiritual beliefs or the sociopolitical climate of 1970s Jamaica – muddies the origins of the life-changing event.

Marley’s upbringing does come back later, in flashback form. We see a young Rita teaching a pre-locs Bob about Rastafari, and the artist’s father, a white naval officer, leaving the family shortly after his son is born. This nonlinear narrative indeed proves more captivating than a traditional storyline, but partially because you’ll be trying to keep up.

Where One Love skirts biopic formula in some places, it makes up for it in others. The success of his 1977 album Exodus is portrayed in a classic fame montage, as the title climbs up the Billboard charts amid a swirl of concert marquees and adoring women. An obligatory climactic blowout between Bob and Rita signals that not all is perfect in these crazy kids’ relationship, but once he’s diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him in 1981, his wife concedes that their problems are all “water under the bridge.”

At 104 minutes, One Love feels mercifully short – until its abrupt ending. The picture wraps just before Marley takes the stage for the 1978 One Love Peace Concert, a real-life critical moment in which the artist returned to Jamaica two years after his assassination attempt to, once again, risk his safety in support of his country. Yet, none of Marley’s undeniable nobility shines through in the final hour. After ignoring earlier requests that he perform at the concert, it's Rita who implores him to participate, and only a few heavy-handed responses to a faceless journalist (“My life is not important,” he says in the interview scene) offer insight into his own state of mind.

The full band performance during the Smile Jamaica concert is one of the film’s most powerful moments; Ben-Adir nails Marley’s dance moves, and the music, decades later, speaks for itself. A similar final scene at the One Love Peace Concert might have capped the movie on a triumphant, full-circle note, but instead, more onscreen text resolves the plot: Marley died of cancer at age 36, his music tops Best Of lists to this day, et cetera. The next generation won’t learn the artist’s whole life story from this biopic, but they just might be inspired to do some Googling after the credits roll.