LE MONDE'S OPINION - AVOIDABLE!

This film is like one of those memorial monuments you walk past and think that the dead person must have been someone important, but the monument manages not to give anything away about the nature of that importance. Produced by the family of Bob Marley (1945-1981) and Brad Pitt's company, Plan B, Bob Marley: One Love is a collection of devotional images that fall short of presenting a real portrait. Touching on both the artist's greatness and his flaws, the film leaves an impression of confusion, whether you know nothing about the career of the world's first star from the so-called "Third World" or know every detail.

There is some hope, however, in the screenplay (by TV series veteran Terence Winter, among others), which focuses on the years from the assassination attempt on Bob Marley's home in Kingston, Jamaica, in December 1976, to the tour that followed the release of the Exodus album (1977), at the end of the 1970s.

The hard law of didactic biography soon reigns supreme. Incessant flashbacks, in the form of short sketches, trace the stages of Marley's irresistible rise to fame (British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir, recently seen as a dissident alien in the Marvel series Secret Invasion); the meeting with his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch); his discovery of Rastafarianism; and the recording of his first original song.

Although the film was shot in Jamaica under the direction of African-American director Reinaldo Marcus Green (The Williams Method, 2021), Kingston's ghettos appear to be the exotic backdrop for conventional interactions rather than the breeding ground for a new art form.

The director's inability to bring to life characters other than the central couple further exacerbates the impression of unreality. Producer Chris Blackwell, the Wailers' musicians and the thugs hired to kill Marley are merely silhouettes identifiable only by their jobs. And while Lynch achieves a certain majesty in her interpretation of Rita, the muse constantly abandoned and then rediscovered, Ben-Adir never recaptures Marley's prophetic dimension.

To get an idea of what it was like in those years that shook Jamaica, from the war of gangs and parties, whose flames were fanned by Cold War antagonists to eventually swallow Marley and reggae, you would be better served to read Marlon James's extraordinary novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings.