The Missing Piece of the Bob Marley Biopic

Nearly 20 years ago, during one of many family trips back to Ethiopia, I spent months wandering through the sprawling capital city. All summer, it seemed, the drivers and cyclists of Addis Ababa were blasting the Ethiopian pop star Teddy Afro’s “Promise,” an infectious, reggae-inflected ode more often referred to by the name of the musician it lionizes: “Bob Marley.”

That 2005 song praised Marley for his commitment to Africa—and argued, more than 23 years after his death, that he be reburied in the motherland. (When he died, Marley was buried inside a small Ethiopian Orthodox–style church in Nine Mile, the hilltop Jamaican village where he was born.) Marley’s wife, Rita, told the press at the time that she intended to exhume his remains, explaining that he saw Ethiopia as his “spiritual resting place.” Though he’s most associated with Jamaica, Marley’s purview extended to a broader Pan-African ethos informed by his commitment to Black-liberation struggles—such as the fight to free Zimbabwe from British rule, which he helped commemorate with a 1980 concert. Crucial to his Rastafari worldview, which he embedded in his music, was a reverence for Africa as the source of Black life.

Thinking back to the Marley fanaticism I encountered in Ethiopia, and all that I’ve learned about his music and life in the years since, I found myself especially disappointed by his anodyne representation in a new film. Bob Marley: One Love bills itself as the story of the musician’s rise and overcoming of adversity. In practice, the movie flattens the revolutionary artist into a saintlike figure committed to peace. But “peace” wasn’t some generic aspiration for Marley. He was specifically interested in resisting the racist, colonial systems that Rastafari teachings identify as a source of suffering among Black people around the world. Sanitizing that kind of heady preoccupation with social justice might be typical for a mainstream biopic, but it does Marley’s rich legacy a tremendous disservice.

One Love begins with standard-issue fare for music movies: The fearless prodigy has complicated feelings about a big performance. In Marley’s case, it’s the Smile Jamaica Concert of 1976, an 80,000-person show and protest against political violence. Days before the performance, he and his band are targeted by gunmen, and Marley is shot in his Kingston home. He presses forward anyway, injured but undeterred. “His guitar is his machine gun,” a white record-label executive observes.

The Trinidadian British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir is charismatic and surprisingly capable as Marley, capturing the musician’s physicality with clear attention to his idiosyncrasies, like in the way he thrashes about onstage with zealous abandon. His accent doesn’t quite hit the mark, though, despite the actor’s diligent work to immerse himself in the signature lilt of Marley’s Jamaican patois. The dissonance is jarring at times, particularly during scenes that portray the music-making process: When the real Marley’s singing voice plays (Ben-Adir largely didn’t re-create his vocals), it’s hard not to wish we could hear the musician speak for himself, too. In the scenes when the music is more naturally integrated, Marley’s catalog helps keep the film afloat: Snapshots of archival performances that include real-life footage are more affecting than the many jam-session scenes in which Ben-Adir’s unfortunate dreadlock wig distracts from the unfolding musical alchemy.

One Love spends much of its runtime on the making of Exodus, the 1977 album that catapulted Marley and his band, the Wailers, to international superstardom. After the Smile Jamaica Concert, the band absconds to London, where they discover dreary weather, racist police, and a new punk sound that enlivens their music. This is where the screenplay (which is credited to four writers) most suffers in its elision of Marley’s Rastafarianism. Many of Marley’s most beloved records explicitly called for oppressed people, especially those in African and Caribbean countries, to rise up against harmful power structures. His songs reflected core beliefs he held, but the film muddles its portrayal of both the religion and the musical revolutions it inspired. Imagine a Malcolm X film that didn’t address his Muslim faith, which was inextricable from his push for civil rights and Black liberation.

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Instead of showing why a young Marley was drawn to the strident Afrocentricity of Rastafari, One Love positions his early search for spiritual belonging as the inevitable outcome of feeling abandoned by his absentee white father, Norval. Woozy flashbacks and dream sequences establish Norval as a mysterious figure appearing on horseback in a blazing field. By the end of the film, he’s replaced in these dream sequences by the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, whom some Rastafari deify as Jah, and whose embrace seems to cure Marley’s feelings of paternal rejection. These surrealist interludes are a lot to handle. But the film’s deeper sin is that it fails to round out the contours of Marley’s attraction to the religious practice that he imbued in all his music. Marley’s feelings about his family were part of what influenced his faith, by all accounts, and songs such as “Corner Stone” were a raw articulation of that deep wound.

In relegating Marley’s pacifism to the realm of interpersonal conflicts, One Love fails to establish crucial context: Jamaica’s fight against British colonialism, which tied into Marley’s Pan-African beliefs. The country gained its independence in 1962, when Marley was 17, and he died before witnessing its second full decade free of British rule. The gifted biracial crooner of the film serves as a bridge between rival gang leaders and politicians, between white and Black, championing a naive peace stripped of any real conviction about the roots of his people’s oppression. For the most part, he’s closer to the placid icon of dorm-room posters and branded weed paraphernalia, a caricature that arose in part because Marley’s Rastafari principles included using cannabis as a sacred rite. That’s a strange fit alongside Marley’s actual music, especially the searching hymn that plays toward the end of the film. “Selassie Is the Chapel” casts the African emperor as a savior from earthly terrors. The brooding ode was originally written and produced by Mortimer Planno, the Rastafari elder who greeted Selassie when he visited Jamaica four years into the country’s independence. To hear Marley sing of the “Conquering Lion of Judah” is to feel him invoke the weighty promise of that convergence between prophecy and fulfillment.

It might be tempting to instinctively blame the biopic’s haphazard hagiography on family involvement. That’s a common pitfall of musician-driven films, and several Marleys do have producing credits on One Love. But I’m not convinced that this alone explains its ideological blankness or its reluctance to address the more unsavory elements of Marley’s persona, such as his habitual womanizing. His son Ziggy was also an executive producer on the 2012 documentary Marley, a nearly exhaustive look at the artist’s life that included critical perspectives from his children and former bandmates. The legendary Bunny Wailer, one of Marley’s original two bandmates, spoke about his strained departure from the early group; Cedella Marley, one of his children with Rita, offered candid reflections on the difficulty of having him as a father.

Glossy artist biopics, which tend to use an accessible narrative structure propelled by recognizable actors, are understandably appealing to some viewers. But many of these films—such as the 2022 Whitney Houston movie, and the 2021 Aretha Franklin movie—fail to make much commercial impact, or burnish their subject’s legend. By contrast, the messy, contradictory revelations in Marley offered valuable insight into what the musician’s art demanded of other people—and what kinds of sacrifices are taken for granted when a musician produces a truly world-altering catalog.

Sinless deities don’t make art; real, flawed people do. For the casual Marley enthusiast, especially those without early memories attached to his work, One Love might offer a less daunting entry point than Marley, which can feel intimidating in its scope. But his music and ideas—and all the people who helped usher them into this fractured world—deserve better.