★★

Is an icon really an icon if they haven’t a by-the-numbers biopic to their name? Perhaps not. It certainly seems that way this side of Bohemian Rhapsody. No doubt, the want for incisive commentary has somewhat petered. Hot on the heels of Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, and just ahead of Sam Taylor-Johnson’s ode to Amy Winehouse, comes Bob Marley: One Love, from King Richard director Reinaldo Marcus Green. Phew, we can finally add the reggae preaching Rastafarian to Wikipedia. At last, he’s made it to perfunctory homage. You’ll learn next to nothing about the man himself here, of course, nothing you didn’t already know, but the tunes come thick and fast and there’s a lot of people saying ‘ye man’. Get that on the merch.

Setting aside the soundtrack of dreams for a moment – Marley’s music is mishandled here but no less awe-inspiring – One Love is no Bohemian Rhapsody. Sure, the Bryan Singer (cough) directed (cough) Queenstravaganza had ample faults but it was never dull. Green’s film enjoys no such luxury. While there’s no doubting that this one is a more technically adept biopic, it never sparkles with anything like Bohemian Rhapsody’s energy. A contracted narrative – the film spans just two years of Marley’s life – does little to focus a script too strident in its attempt to validate the importance of its subject to notice the lack of humanity in its own depiction.

Take Kingsley Ben-Adir, who leads the film as a heavily wigged and accented Bob Marley. For all his efforts, Ben-Adir bears minimal resemblance to Marley, a man whose arcane features far outpaced his actual years. He hasn’t the ‘lived-in’ look, one might say. You can see the cogs turning – ostensibly, Ben-Adir began his intensive rehearsals on the set of Barbie – but it backfires. His portrayal of Marley is too careful, too precision-engineered, and too obvious in its pseudo-Day Lewisms. You can see the admiration he feels for Marley but that’s part of the issue. He’s not playing a real man, he’s playing a god on Earth and buckles to the task. Not that it can have been an easy one with Marley’s entire surviving family on the production roll call.

The same cannot be said for Lashana Lynch, who plays Marley’s wife Rita. Hers is a performance rich in pathos and relaxed in delivery. In the context of reality, Rita is rather under-served here, her own artistic merit and personal resilience inadequately conveyed. Only once does Green allow a breach in his saintly portrayal of Marley and it is in this moment that the force of Rita’s personhood truly shines. There’s empowerment in her backhand and a feel for the friction so lacking elsewhere in the narrative. Everything sails just a little too smoothly, an increasing reliance on music montage betraying the dearth of actual content. At times, One Love veers into concert film territory. Marley’s own recordings replace Ben-Adir’s in the final cut.

In actuality, with vocals included, it is entirely possible that Marley himself has more lines in One Love than the star playing him. Gifted free rein by the family, Green packs in Marley’s greatest hits like he’s been added to the royalties. Some land, some float, some sink. Most sink. This is less owing to the strength of the music than the way Green leads them in, raising eyebrows and the odd unintentional guffaw. In one segue, Bob’s row with Rita cues No Woman No Cry, while another sees a character’s request for forgiveness cut to Redemption Song. Most heinous of all is the klaxon beckoning in Three Little Birds and the vocal ‘this is my message to you-oo-oo’. This just once scene after Rita tells her husband: ‘sometimes the messenger has to become the message’. Ye man, it’s true.

T.S.