Before Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) became a worldwide sensation bringing reggae music and pillars of Rastafari to all people, he first lit a social and political fire ablaze back in his home country of Jamacia. His band, Bob Marley & The Wailers, was booked to play at the Smile Jamacia concert, a free event that was organized to help ease the political tensions on the island. Surviving an assassination attempt days before the concert, he and the band, including his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch), moved to London after the event. There, they recorded Exodus in 1977 to immediate acclaim, and after touring the album Marley returned to Jamaica for the One Love Peace Concert, another attempt to quell the political unrest in the nation. 

Sanctioned by the Marley estate, Reinaldo Marcus Green brings Bob Marley: One Love to screens, a biopic that covers two pivotal years in the too-short life of one of the most renowned reggae musicians. The script was seemingly written by committee; a group effort between Green along with Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers, and Zach Baylin. Distributed by Paramount Pictures, the 107-minute film walks the line of playing some of Marely’s hits in a sort of compilation music video while also trying to delve into how his global fame affected him, but with the estate making sure to curate his image, the film does not show a very vibrant portrait of his otherwise colorful personality. 

The film opens in media res leading up to Smile Jamaica Concert, forgoing a long opening with Marley as a young boy instead opting for the briefest of scenes where he is handed a Bible as his parents depart Jamacia for America. The following 30-some years of his life are delivered through a litany of intertitles allowing the action of the film to begin immediately and introduce sampling of some of Marley’s earlier works that helped establish him as a voice in the genre. It will return to these flashbacks to color in his childhood to varying effect though at times it seems more like a dream than a factual distillation. Oftentimes, the film makes sudden leaps back, but only some of the times do these transitions make sense with the pacing or the scene in the present’s action that led into it.  

The concert comes quickly though, within the first half hour, and then it shifts off the island to London where it begins to slow down. It becomes a little more aimless while Bob and his band begin teasing out their next album, but the actual goals of the narrative are also looser and less defined than they were in the lead-up to Smile Jamaica.  While his music still plays a huge role in this second act and the film does a good job at capturing the live wire of creativity, it still loses a lot of the energy that was present in the first act. Much of this is due to how the film captures London. Cinematographer Robert Elswit captures Jamacia with love in the lens despite Bob’s frustrations with the political climate. London, however, is not home and the camera captures those same red, yellow, and green colors but with a stuffiness of business about them. The UK is a land of routine, bricks, and starchy suits more concerned with profit and marketability than the free flow of music and ideas. This is clearly purposeful, and it is also effective, but for audiences, it slows the film down as it adopts all the visual excitement of analyzing a P&L statement. 

Thankfully, though, Ben-Adir commands the screen while still being easy-natured, knowing you attract more flies with honey. It is an incredibly mild performance, but not one that gets lost in the action of the scene; we never doubt for a moment that Bob is not in control even during the assassination attempt on his life and the immediate aftermath. This easy-going tone carries throughout the entire film so much so that the bombastic scene between him and Rita after a party feels like an outlier to the film and a bit of a betrayal of tone. Rita absolutely controls the scene, following how it was written, and Lynch is stunning in it, but it also marks where Ben-Adir begins to lose his grip on the character he has been building when he raises his voice in return and again later with the band manager Don Taylor (Anthony Welsh).  

This ten-or-so-minute sequence of nearly back-to-back scenes feels heavily noted by the estate to preserve Bob’s reputation which is in stark contrast to the notes from Paramount executives who are looking for some conflict in their film so that it does not sit stagnant across the runtime. The fight does achieve what the Suits were looking for, though, as it helps to set up some emotional stakes which the film had been lacking as it was beginning to tread water while the band was on tour. Just as this new arena is set up for the third act, the film again abruptly shifts gears to tackle Bob’s cancer diagnosis, dramatic in its own right, but the scriptwriting team, limited by the facts, struggle to get the energy back on track as they begin to wind down their narrative. 

One Love is, as a music biopic should be, is full of music. It is surprising though that it is most immersive in the quieter sequences where the band is riffing off of each other. During the concert scene when the energy should be high, the camera work is rather still, almost lazy. This allows Ben-Adir to really inject his energy into the scene but unfortunately, the choice of camera angles often hides his lips either behind his hair, or the mic, or it captures the performance from behind, so the music does not necessarily feel integrated seamlessly with the visuals. What it does do well though, is it is loud and bustling so that fans and newcomers to the music will feel it reverberate within them. 

The film treats Bob’s legacy with far more care and respect than any of the pseudo-intellectual potheads with a persecution complex that crawl around college campuses ever did, and it is a refreshing reclamation of his story that was endorsed by his son, Ziggy, in an opening spot. Its problems lie not in the performances or even necessarily the script because there are moments where everything comes together in some really engaging sequences, but it plays it so safely. It is meandering in its pace without clear narrative goals, and while it shakes the temptation to be a traditional cradle-to-grave biopic, it does not seem particularly interested in distilling facts about Bob Marley, either. The script is framed by chapter titles of a larger story that does the cast a disservice by not delving deeper into who these people were. Because of that, they struggle to build their characters. For us watching, we bump and bristle along and against these people, but we are left grasping for some structure so that we know what the film is working towards. As presented, there is no real arc, but rather loose vignettes held together by Ben-Adir’s magnetism on screen.