At the end of Bob Marley: One Love, the filmmakers reveal their politics by quoting Time magazine’s declaration of Marley’s 1977 Exodus as the best album of the 20th century. (The pronouncement placed Exodus alongside the James Joyce novel Ulysses, the song “Strange Fruit,” the musical Carousel, the nonfiction book The Gulag Archipelago, the film Citizen Kane, and the TV show The Simpsons.) In this context Bob Marley: One Love is not just another biopic; it reinforces the authority of our liberal, know-it-all media establishment.
Director Reinaldo Marcus Green takes his cue from the Time agenda, according to which Exodus was “a political and cultural nexus.” In his pedestrian way, Green attempts the same synthesis. That’s how the media contrive to shape our values and sense of history. BM:OL is not about the birth of reggae music, but it perpetuates Marley’s iconography — the actor Kingsley Ben-Adir’s impersonation rivals the infamous Che Guevara for poster and T-shirt hipness.
BM:OL is a superficial biopic, despite the subsidiary pleasures of its music-performance scenes. (Its opening concert features an assassination attempt to foreground Marley as a political threat.) The movie portrays Marley’s origins in the slum capital Kingston after Jamaica’s independence from the British Commonwealth; its “yards” developments, Trenchtown squatter-settlements, and social strife fertilized a unique music culture. Introducing Marley as the biracial son of a white Briton then a Natty Dread (natural dreadlocks) figure doesn’t suffice as the explanation for his quasi-revolutionary artistic expression.
Green casually acknowledges Marley’s Rastafarianism (a Gospel-based religious and social movement that translated slavery experience into the struggle for redemption) as the source of Marley’s ethnic identity. Yet this narrative feels slick, less devout than the James Brown film Get On Up or Oliver Stone’s Jim Morrison film The Doors — that’s the style Green copies while selling the diasporic nature of Marley’s image for its appeal to Western liberals.
Marley won a following outside Jamaica, specifically among white sophomores who were drawn to his exoticism. Coming after Marvin Gaye’s topical What’s Going On album, Marley’s first releases redefined post-civil-rights attitudes, replete with rhythm and ganja. Their sound rang new changes on American R & B, which, for some, had become overfamiliar. His loping tempo and “get up, stand up” rallying cry were also quasi-revolutionary. (“Vague politics of dubious depth,” one ’70s critic dared point out.) Reggae’s greater impact on British culture — an inspiration for the sound and politics of British punk artists from The Clash to Scritti Politti, Madness, and The Au Pairs — is glossed over. Green and his co-screenwriters stick to rise-to-fame, behind-the-scenes formulas (including Island Records founder Chris Blackwell sponsoring Marley’s recording career), here slanted into the social-justice pretense so popular in Hollywood now.
It’s same the ploy Green used in King Richard, the sluggish Will Smith vehicle about the father of tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams. The mix of cultural history and political significance is exactly the nexus that passes for depth among culturally illiterate Millennials.
BM:OL also recalls the fatuous cultural history of One Night in Miami, in which Kingsley Ben-Adir played Malcolm X in a fabricated summit meeting with Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown. These social-justice biopics remake cultural history for a generation that never experienced the excitement of risk-taking artists but is happy to fold their legend into the easy clichés of modern activist cant. Look at Ben-Adir’s smoothed-out characterization — Marley, like his Malcolm, without rough edges except a couple of scenes with Lashana Lynch as Rita Marley, the steadfast, loyal wife and singer in Marley’s I-Threes backup group. Green and Ben-Adir mostly present facile charm to advance today’s facile notion of celebrity-heroism.
The pop approach to music and politics is no less solemn than the lugubrious 1982 biopic Gandhi. It tempts one to muse on the performer’s name: Imagine it was Ben Kingsley repeating the neo-saintliness of Gandhi but with springy dreads like Jay-Z’s, in his wild bougie emulation of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s bohemian hairdo. It completes this film’s contrived political significance.
In Bob Marley: One Love, the commercialization of black culture continues. Its music, faith, and public figures are so brazenly manipulated that even Marley’s ethnic radicalism gets rechanneled — officially approved by Time, the same devious institution that jinxed Lauryn Hill’s career, with its 1999 “Hip-Hop Nation” cover story, and that then, decades later, just as dubiously, declared Taylor Swift “Person of the Year.”