“They were nobodies,” recalled the record producer Chris Blackwell of the time in 1972 when Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Livingston breezed into his London office. “But they were like huge stars in their attitude and the vibe they gave off.” The trio of assured harmony singers who called themselves the Wailers signed with Blackwell’s Island Records shortly afterward, and their collective creativity came together in Catch a Fire, their dazzling fifth album and their first for the label.
But the three weren’t just in sync with one another; they were aligned with Jah (Jehovah). Benjamin Foot, the road manager assigned to the unknown Jamaican reggae musicians, remembered that as they toured tiny clubs in the UK in a beat-up old van, they argued nonstop, but not over girls or the order of songs for the set; the earnest Rastafarians were arguing over scripture. Foot said it was like being in a mobile seminary.
Within a couple of years, however, the fissures that appeared early in the Wailers’ association with Island Records widened and unbalanced them, and they fell into disharmony. Eclipsed, disenchanted, and outmaneuvered by Blackwell (or Chris Whiteworst, as Tosh called him), Livingston and Tosh split from their comrade of ten years, leaving Marley to assume authority over the band and the brand. “It was like they’d been three bulls in a paddock,” says the Jamaican writer Viv Adams. “They’d grown big together, grown to be bulls, outgrown the field, and along came Blackwell. He lifted the latch and let one of the three, Brother Bob, go free.” Blackwell later admitted his discomfort at working with the recalcitrant Tosh and the elusive Livingston. His focus was always on Marley, whom he envisaged as the dynamic center of the group and a singer with the potential to become a revolutionary superstar. With new members brought in to replace Tosh and Livingston, the band was no longer simply the Wailers; it was now Bob Marley and the Wailers.
Bob Marley: One Love, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, is tightly focused on the period between 1976 and 1978, the most consequential years of Marley’s career and of Jamaica’s postindependence history, when the country descended into near civil war. The film is framed by two remarkable concerts in Kingston: the 1976 Smile Jamaica Concert (impressionistically restaged through subtle lighting and sound rather than CGI) and the One Love Peace Concert in 1978 (conveyed with archival footage of the performance). Both concerts demonstrated Marley’s extraordinary dedication to his homeland and his ability to tap into a crowd’s mood, to articulate Jamaicans’ hopes and fears, and to answer their yearning for songs of redemption.
At the start of the film, Marley has consolidated his position not just as the leader of the band but also as the most recognizable face of reggae. He has filled the space vacated by Tosh and Livingston. But how do you tell the story of Marley without two of the three pillars of the original Wailers, without the many women (other than his wife, Rita) in this womanizing musician’s life, and without grounding the film in the reality of a febrile political climate in which the divided population believes that when your political party is in power you eat and when the other man’s party is ascendant you starve? Green’s eliding of Livingston and especially of Tosh, who in the formation and evolution of the group acted as a musical and temperamental counterpoint to Marley, is a serious misstep.
The film still manages to capture something of the essence of Brother Bob. The task of inhabiting the figure of the charismatic, otherworldly, natural mystic Robert Nesta Marley is a huge challenge for any actor. The trick, it seems, is not to appear to try. Kingsley Ben-Adir, unrecognizable from his recent role as one of the Kens in Barbie, plays it nice and easy, with a performance so seductive that you sometimes forget One Love’s lack of depth.
Ben-Adir’s Marley is centered, watchful, earnest, and philosophical in the down-to-earth way that is characteristic of every Rasta I’ve met. His cadence matches Marley’s but is tweaked to make it intelligible to those whose ears aren’t tuned to Jamaican patois. Ben-Adir gives off the unmatchable cool vibe of a star; he exudes Marley’s intriguing, humble, but starry personality, especially when onstage dressed in battle fatigues, flashing his Medusa-like dreadlocks.
Jamaica looks gorgeous, too. The cinematography heightens the island’s fecund and verdant beauty, its steaming blue mountains, salted sea winds, pungent banana groves, and charming cliff-edge huts. Even the Trenchtown ghetto where Marley grew up poor—as evoked by a line in “Talkin’ Blues,” “Cold ground was my bed last night/And rock was my pillow, too”—looks appealing. Trenchtown is shot in saturated colors that give a sheen to an impoverished world, but this is inaccurate: in reality it was a gritty empire of dirt, perhaps better suited to less beautiful, lower-resolution filming.
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Trenchtown’s hardships, the subject of Marley’s song “Concrete Jungle,” forged the character of the reggae star known to his retinue as “Screw Face,” “Skipper,” and “Tuff Gong.” They have, as the film begins, moved with him to his headquarters on Hope Road, a significant upgrade from the ghetto. Formerly the property of Blackwell, a wealthy white Jamaican descended from Alexander Lindo, a merchant associated with the transatlantic slave trade, 56 Hope Road has been “captured” by Marley after a payment dispute with his Island Records manager that ended amicably with the transfer of its ownership. It has become a communal compound with a recording studio, rehearsal rooms, and living quarters for the band, family members, and the odd supplicant. Marley’s acolytes follow him around, judiciously executing his orders and answering his queries about things done and things to be done. In some regards, he acts like a medical consultant making hospital rounds with trailing junior doctors and nurses, albeit one whose presence is announced by a heavy waft of marijuana.
“Screw Face” refers to Marley’s mostly serious disposition, “Skipper” is the name his deferential bandmates give their leader, and “Tuff Gong” (Marley was said to have considered himself a tougher version of Gong, aka the Rasta leader Leonard Howell) denotes everyone’s understanding of his fierce, indomitable spirit. Well, almost everyone’s. To the unimpressed soldiers guarding the barbed wire roadblocks and military checkpoints dotted around this small Caribbean island, Marley is just another nasty, barefoot Rasta yard boy.
In one scene, driving downtown, Marley is pulled over by soldiers and receives the usual rough and insulting treatment. He tells his sons, “Don’t worry, be happy. ’Cause every little thing gonna be alright.” Green is determined to show, in an unsubtle, even risible way, the happenstance of creativity and the origin stories of songs like “Three Little Birds”—in this case drawn from everyday conversation—that would only be written and recorded a year later.
Some may think that Jamaica at the time was a paradise, a playground for the rich, not yet within the reach of mass tourism. But as those roadblocks reveal, the mid-1970s were a fractious turning point. The economy has tanked, the International Monetary Fund has put a fiscal squeeze on the country, and rumors abound of CIA operatives attempting to destabilize the left-wing government. The gulf between the rich and the poor, as characterized in Marley’s song “Them Belly Full (But We Hungry),” has grown, and the poor population is living in hellish conditions. The two major political parties, the People’s National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), are led by men ideologically and dangerously poles apart. The unashamedly socialist Michael Manley is ridiculed by the JLP as “Castro’s poodle,” and the zealous capitalist Edward Seaga, favored by Washington, is derided by the PNP as “Edward CIAga.” You don’t really glean much of this from the film, which shows only rival gunmen, proxies for the two parties, exchanging shots. The body count has mounted as guns have flooded the island.
The dangers of Kingston—early in the film, locals scramble for cover during a random drive-by shooting—are contrasted with the peace of Bull Bay, the Edenic Rasta settlement ten miles away where Marley’s family has taken refuge. It’s an arrangement that suits Brother Bob, enabling him to better manage his love life. Until recently he had been living in his Kingston headquarters with the white Jamaican beauty queen Cindy Breakspeare, though this is only alluded to in the film, while his wife, Rita (Lashana Lynch), one of the I Threes’ backup singers, is firmly established in Bull Bay.
Lynch’s subtle and intelligent performance demonstrates Rita’s skepticism about her husband’s closest advisers, as well as her affecting tenderness toward the man she first met when they were teenagers. In a flashback to his youth, Marley worries that Rita will have an aversion to him because of his fair complexion, the result of his having a black mother and a white father (who has rejected him); black Jamaicans historically associate whiteness with privilege and plunder, which is one of the reasons Marley accentuated his blackness. The film shows Rita as a forgiving, patient educator, schooling her young love in the tenets of Rastafari, a religion he soon adopted.
Marley’s embrace of Rastafari is handled thoughtfully by Green. The fatherless child finds an alternative family in the religion. He is welcomed by father figures like the street intellectual Mortimer Planno (Wilfred Chambers), whose growly, worldly-wise reflections emerge as chillums are passed around at Nyabinghi Rasta ceremonies and rational thought becomes a chimera. Rastas do not believe that Jamaica is their home; they are shipwrecked people, Africans in exile, as Joe Ryglass was known to chant: “Jamaica is a islan’/But not I lan’.”
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This is a sentiment, though, to which Marley doesn’t fully adhere. And when he announces that the Smile Jamaica Concert, billed as “Bob’s Christmas gift to the pop enthusiasts of Kingston,” will take place just days before a general election, it is seen by the opposition party as an endorsement of the government rather than as a neutral act of the nonaligned, which will soon place him in jeopardy.
At its best the film captures this naiveté of Marley’s, which is coupled with optimism, even when political gunmen slip into the Hope Road headquarters in the dead of night on a mission to assassinate him. Fortunately they can’t shoot straight, though Marley is wounded when a bullet slams into his arm. This shocking attack is reminiscent of the assault on Michael Corleone’s compound in The Godfather Part II, when his family home is strafed by machine-gun fire. But because Green’s portrayal of the attempted assassination in One Love borders on the darkly comic, it lacks intensity; the violence has none of the buildup of menace and dread that Coppola was able to portray.
In Roger Steffens’s oral history, So Much Things to Say (2017), the journalist Jeff Walker recalls that in the aftermath of the shooting, Marley was adamant in saying, “There’s no way I’m going on stage [at Smile Jamaica] without a machine gun.” But One Love depicts his bravery in performing unarmed at the concert just days later, before he fled to London. He remained there for two years and recorded one of his finest albums, Exodus, which speaks to his sense of exile.
The film’s producers contend that its “accuracy and authenticity isn’t just integral to this movie’s DNA, it’s the direct result of it. Bob Marley: One Love is a movie not made with the blessing of the Marley family, but by the actual family themselves.” The family’s approval is evident; in particular the film bears the imprimatur of Rita Marley as one of the producers. But this version of her former husband’s story is also weakened by its deference to the family’s policing of Marley’s legacy.
There are a number of friends in One Love who seem to have been sidelined, like troublesome family members not invited to the wedding because the hosts fear an embarrassing scene. Apart from a short perfunctory flashback to the Wailers’ origin story, with the teenage trio auditioning for the wily, violent, gun-wielding record impresario Coxsone Dodd, Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh hardly feature in the film. Their diminished importance robs One Love of vital illuminating background.
The minimal role of Cindy Breakspeare (Umi Myers) is also confusing. She spent at least a year living in London with Marley during his period of exile, but her part is reduced to a fleeting shot of her waiting outside a phone booth as Marley calls Rita. Breakspeare’s marginal presence, though, is a catalyst for one of the more fascinating later episodes, in which we see the impact of Marley’s affairs on his wife’s sense of betrayal. In a bruising scene, a roiling nose-to-nose argument while they’re on tour in Europe, Rita chastises her husband after he has the temerity to question her involvement with another man. The violent matrimonial row, which culminates in Rita slapping him, stuns Marley into silence. More frequent examples of his human foibles would have made for a richer film.
Fewer dream sequences would also have been advisable. One Love is punctuated by a dreamlike motif in which Marley is seen as a young boy running through a clearing as a fire in a field of crops rises up behind him and a lone, military-looking white man, wearing a pith helmet and riding a white horse, trots by, ignoring him. This motif is a bit perplexing at first, but its meaning evolves through repetition alongside other flashbacks to his youth. It symbolizes Marley’s confusion at being trapped, with few options to escape his traumatic childhood. Later in the film, the mounted man undergoes a transformation from the shadowy figure of his biological father to his spiritual one: Haile Selassie. Marley’s abandonment as a child and redemption through Rastafari is echoed in the mournful, prayerlike reggae track that breaks through the silence: “Selassie is the Chapel.”
This centrality of redemption in Marley’s life is underscored at the end of the film in one of the most dramatic moments in Jamaican history: the One Love Peace Concert. After a visit from the two leaders of rival gangs of gunmen from both political parties sent as emissaries to London, Marley yields to their plea that he return to Jamaica and broker peace on the island by headlining the concert. But having carefully set up the scene that has been heralded for much of the film, One Love declines to restage the extraordinary drama of that moonlit night of April 22, 1978. Rather it cedes the stage, as it were, to archival footage.
It’s a shrewd move on Green’s part, as it’s almost impossible to match the emblematic power of that grainy film. There’s a palpable sense of jeopardy, of the prospect that things may get out of control. This might be a night of revelation and judgment. Marley the Messiah may have fallen into a trap, with the possibility that the botched assassination attempt of two years earlier may now succeed.
In the footage of the concert, the battery of huge lights piercing the night sky struggles to keep track of Marley “livelying up himself” onstage at Jamaica’s National Stadium. Often he appears as if he’s about to fall before recovering. He arches his back, hops from foot to foot, and swirls in a trancelike and ecstatic jig. As his dreadlocks flail, lightning sparks and thunder crackles to the booming reggae bass line. Marley cries out again and again: “We’re going to unite! We gotta unite!”
The archive does not include footage of Tosh, who performed an hour before Bob Marley and the Wailers that night. Tosh’s powerful revolutionary rant was not televised, because he commanded that the cameras be turned off. With a giant spliff in hand, blowing smoke in the direction of the astounded political leaders in the front row, Tosh berated both parties for creating the “shitstem” responsible for the calamitous state of affairs that had led to hundreds of political murders and caught many others in the crossfire. “Peace?” screamed Tosh. He didn’t want any peace. “Peace is the diploma you get in the cemetery.” He wanted equal rights and justice.
One Love has no time or room for Tosh’s dark pessimism. Instead it honors Marley’s conviction and the spirit of peace and love, especially at the moment when he calls two men onto the stage who loathed each other: Manley and Seaga. Reluctantly the two climb up, barely able to look at each other, like a couple embarrassed by their sudden forced marriage. Marley takes the hand of each one and raises them in the air, so that they form a holy and unlikely trinity. It’s a psychic and symbolic moment of hope, peace, and love, an opportunity for the warring parties to put down their guns. The purity of that moment cannot be challenged. Only later did Jamaicans liken the scene to Christ on the cross between the two thieves.
Bob Marley, One Love suggests, is a savior. In continuing his beatification, the film ultimately loses sight of the complex character of this inspiring and flawed man, who died of melanoma in 1981. Still, to its credit it will send cinemagoers back to explore the ethereal beauty of albums like Catch a Fire and Burnin’.
“You can’t separate the music from the message” is Marley’s mantra throughout the film. And despite its flaws, Bob Marley: One Love confirms what Bunny Livingston told me a dozen years ago when, drawing on his wisdom and a spliff, he asserted, “Robert Nesta Marley will be here for posterity because his message of ‘one love’ is eternal.”
