If I had read the reviews in advance, I probably wouldn’t have gone to see One Love this past Thursday evening, one day after its Valentine’s release. If you’ve read the reviews, you’re probably not planning to see it yourself. So trust me (and other cinemagoers, given this story that just broke1) when I say: though far from perfect, as few films are, One Love takes on the evasive subject of one of the most popular musicians the world has ever seen - the one and only Bob Marley - and makes a very good film out of it.
Some of the reasons that One Love succeeds:
1) It does not tell the whole story. Unlike most biopics, One Love makes no attempt to start at the beginning and end at the end, let alone explain a whole life. Rather, it hones in on a critical period in Bob’s life and near-death. That period begins in late 1976, when Bob was still “only” reggae’s first international star, Kingston (Jamaica) was in a state of political street war, Bob was about to headline a concert perceived as siding with the ruling party, and an assassination attempt was made on his life. The film then follows his enforced exile from Jamaica as a result, time he spent mainly in England, where he made a conscious decision to become more commercial and go global, succeeding in this aim with the album Exodus, recorded in London; deals with the temptations that resulted from his subsequent superstar success; and ends with his return home in 1978 to headline a One Love concert at which, this time, his peaceful goals came to fruition as he famously brought the warring political leaders onstage to lock hands. That is more than enough content for 100 minutes.
2) It is, mostly, factually accurate. As a biographer, I bristle at films that claim to be a biopic but then play hard and fast with the truth. If some of this is professional jealousy – why do my books have to have their facts in order when a film can just make shit up? – much of it is also just plain annoyance at the lies. Freddie Mercury’s life story made for a great story sense without the need to re-arrange all the details in the wrong order in Bohemian Rhapsody, condensing multiple events into one, and, frankly, fabricating the whole of his end-of-life AIDS saga. But while there are some specific scenes in One Love that play out in implausible circumstances, the general story runs true to Timothy White’s Catch a Fire, which I consider one of the great music biographies, and to the 2012 documentary Marley, each project of which had participation from all the key characters in Bob’s life.
3) It is not hagiography. Fans have every reason to fear for the worst, given the Marley family’s direct involvement in One Love. Indeed, Ziggy Marley’s brief on-camera introduction, assuring us of its accuracy, immediately suggests we are in for a sugar-coated story in which his father will be portrayed as pure Saint. Instead – and although we must wait a while for it – Bob’s well-known womanizing (he fathered 11 children from 7 mothers), lapses in Rastafarianism, and flashes of grievous violence are all presented openly, as is his long-suffering wife Rita Marley’s own marital indiscretions. Rita is one of the many Marleys who serves as an Executive Producer on One Love, and the family members clearly came to understand that for a character to be plausible – even one like Robert Nesta Marley, who had much of the supernatural about him – he has to be fallible.
4) One Love does not underestimate its audience. Director Reinaldo Marcus Green always keeps in mind the basic premise of storytelling: Show, don’t tell. If viewers were hoping to have everything neatly laid out for them chronologically, they are in for a disappointment.I see it as a strength, not a weakness, of the film, that only gradually do we learn (some) circumstances of Marley’s upbring: that he had a white father (40 years his mother’s elder, he vanished quickly upon news of her pregnancy, was disinherited by his own family, and was almost entirely absent from young Robert Nesta’s life; an allegorical scene of what we perceive to be Captain Marley on horseback is central to the storyline), and that he was packed off to Kingston on a bus from the countryside as a 5-year old.2 What we do see, from the beginning, is a man who knew his calling in life: to write and play and sing music, to bring people together with it, to practice and preach Rastafarianism once he converted to it, to go running with his brethren every morning, to play football every afternoon. True to his spiritual existence, Bob was more content to live an Ital (natural) existence with his bandmates than in luxury, which of course meant he never kept a keen enough eye on the money, a subject that has haunted much of his legacy, but which is only dealt with here peripherally.
And then, of course, there is the music.
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All in all, this is a story I’m fascinated by. My love for reggae runs incredibly deep – I named my fanzine/magazine after the third single from 1977’s Exodus, Marley’s first top 10 UK hit “Jamming” – and over the years I have tried to ensure that I’ve watched all the reggae films, read the books, and spent as much time doing my reggae homework as being soothed by its sounds. My old group Apocalypse played as much reggae as we ever did punk, and I came of age with front line roots rock reggae as a common denominator soundtrack during my days in Brixton and evenings in Ladbroke Grove. Last year I wrote a 9000 word essay on “The Studio as Instrument in Jamaican Dub Reggae” for college, and just ten days before seeing One Love, I’d been at the same cinema – the wonderfully creative and pleasant Orpheum in Saugerties – for a special screening of The Upsetter: The Life & Music of Lee “Scratch” Perry.
At the same time, Marley’s global status and knack for the commercial love song meant that I devoted insufficient attention to him during those years I was engaged in the music scene and he was still alive; he was so popular that I left him to the masses. My appreciation for his vast oeuvre, which dates back to 1962, his incredible people skills, his shamanic personality, his revolutionary spirit, and especially, his global popularity – traveling the world in 2016 convinced me that he is the most beloved musician on the planet, and the 23 million estimated global sales of the posthumous compilation Legend back that up to some but not the full lasting extent – has grown substantially over the years. I had every reason to want to see this film, therefore, and every justification to come down hard on it if I felt as let down as I often do by the big money musical biopic.
The professional critics have not exactly raved about One Love, but something even the most negative of reviews have been compelled to note is that Kingsley Ben-Adir pulls off Robert Nesta Marley’s character, his poise, his poses, his onstage dervishes, perfectly – this despite the fact that the actor is significantly taller, paler, more conventionally handsome, and speaks in a far softer patois than his character. Despite his winning performance, I’d argue that he is outdone by Lashana Lynch’s Rita, who stands tall throughout this movie as Bob’s rock, his courage, and also his conscience. Was it really Rita who turned Nesta (as he was known among his Black community for much of his early life) onto Rastafarianism, as the movie depicts? Not to my understanding, but either way Wilfred Chambers is a dead ringer for Bob’s real-life religious mentor, the famed Mortimer Planno, and scenes involving Chambers are among the movie’s deepest.
James Norton plays an affable and visually believable Chris Blackwell, the white, Jamaican-born Island Records founder, who is never officially introduced as such – see the earlier point about show, don’t tell – and though record company bosses often get short shrift in their musicians’ telling, Blackwell comes out of this film entirely unblemished. Similarly, various Wailers actors are frighteningly close to their intended characters, though in the case of bass player Aston “Family Man” Barrett’s (who passed away just before the film’s release), that’s probably because it’s his son playing the part. Such attention to visual detail is welcome, and it extends across the board: even the band assembled, but not knowingly referenced, as The Clash, performing “White Riot” in a club that looks like a near-perfect recreation of The Marquee, is a lot truer to the real thing than any number of cinematic attempts to recreate the Sex Pistols.
Below: the real thing, from the peak period depicted in the movie
These visual accuracies only serve to render some of the film’s convenient shortcuts all the more annoying. For while Bob Marley (and Wailers) most certainly did absorb the spirit of punk during their creative exile in London (see the aforementioned “Punk Reggae Party” with its references to “The Damned, The Jam, the Clash”), I am truly sick of seeing the tourist postcard Kings Road high-mohawk, leather-jacketed punks depicted as scenesters back in 1977, when any fool could tell you they were invisible until whatever you want to call that horrible explosion of back-to-basics punks not dead riotous (not righteous) noise that took over the Indie charts circa 1980. Additionally, the way that this perfect Marquee club suddenly opens out into what is meant to be a re-enactment of the Notting Hill Riots (but looks nothing like them) is perhaps only allegorical – we have to allow movie-makers their fictions, just as Timothy White’s Marley biography invented dialogue from conversations that may never have existed – but it over- stretches the imagination for anyone who was close to being there.
Nonetheless, there is more truth than fiction in this film. Bob Marley did indeed have a meeting in London with the formerly sparring warlord henchmen of the rival Jamaican politicians Michael Manley and Edward Seaga3- Bucky Marshall and Claudie Massop, respectively - who were successful in bringing Marley back to Jamaica for the One Love concert. (The chances that the encounter took place randomly, in Battersea Park, with Bob out jogging on his own at the height of his fame, however, are remote at best.) Marley did indeed learn that a second injury to his right toe, sustained in a football match in Paris, was cancerous, on 7/7/77 – the day that the two sevens clashed, twice over. (Declining to have the toe amputated, Marley suffered mostly in silence and secret as the cancer spread and took his life in 1981, age just 36.) Marley was presented with a ring (supposedly the Ring of Solomon) that had belonged to Ethiopian King Haile Selassie, and allowing that Selassie was considered the literal second coming of Jesus Christ by his Rasta followers, this gifting deferred immense status upon a musician who had not sought it. All in all, Robert Nesta Marley carried a very heavy load for a mixed-race country boy of poverty.
Crucially, given that it forms the foundation of the movie, the assassination attempt at the Island Records house on Hope Road in uptown Kingston did play out as depicted, even down to Bob’s then-manager Don Taylor inadvertently stepping in the way just as Bob realized he was about to be shot dead and taking six bullets. (Miraculously, he survived.) The film chooses not to explore the possibility that the assassination attempt may have been unrelated to Massop and Marshall, each of whom denied responsibility, but to a rigged horse race deal in which Marley was being reluctantly forced to pay off the ringleaders. The truth will never be known: all the participants in the raid showed up dead soon after, some of them brutally murdered, but for a couple of the shooters who seemed to have become possessed by “duppies,” left to wander the Kingston streets in states of madness. Massop and Marshall followed in time.
For sure, there are large gaps in the story. Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, Robert Nesta’s partners in the original Wailers, are mentioned only in a street-argument between Robert and Rita outside a swish Island Records party in Paris, an event that did take place even if the argument did not. Bunny and Tosh are, however, depicted in a scene in which the teenage Wailers, with Rita’s group the Soulettes as backup, audition for Big Three producer Lloyd Coxsone and his engineer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry in the early 60s. It’s a not entirely unfair amalgamation of the Wailers’ formative days and it provides the one moment of true comic relief in what is otherwise a dry film: having bored Coxsone silly with their sappy American-influenced soul (an influence that never left Bob), the teenage Wailers switch to “Simmer Down” as a last-ditch effort to bring Coxsone around, and when the suddenly impressed studio owner turns to get Perry’s opinion, Scratch is seen dancing on the mixing board in validation – as he was, apparently, wont to do in real life. From a beanie-hatted Peter Tosh to a pistol-happy Lloyd Coxsone and the group’s tutor, Joe (Higgs, who coached the Wailers for two years and years later replaced Bunny on tour), the attention to detail in this scene is astounding. But with the film’s reliance on showing rather than telling, most of these characters are not introduced by name, their relevance to music history similarly unnoted, and the average film-goer may well go away none the wiser.
Similarly, there was indeed a white dude called Jeff (Walker, Island press officer) at the emergency hilltop meeting in Jamaica with Bob after the assassination attempt, and Bob was indeed busted for marijuana while in London, though both scenes stretch belief in other ways. And while guitarist Junior Marvin did join The Wailers in London in early 1977 as lead guitarist, the scene in which he auditions on Blackwell’s recommendation is laughable, primarily because actor David Marvin Kerr Jr.’s guitar-playing is as egregious as his character’s perm, and I wouldn’t have taken him into my own band at the time, let alone the biggest reggae group on the planet. (Fortunately, the real Junior Marvin was more subtle on the six-string and an excellent addition to a group that benefited tremendously from the presence of a true an English-Jamaican musician.)
It is surely no spoiler alert to say that everything points to the movie’s obvious denouement – that famous moment when, in the middle of a magnificently freeform “Jamming,” Marley spontaneously called Manley and Seaga onstage together at the One Love concert, forcing them through their clearly clenched teeth to clasp hands with him and raise them high in a gesture of peace, if not exactly one of life-long goodwill. It’s a singular achievement that no other popular musician has ever managed, to the best of my knowledge, anywhere in the world, and it validates Bob’s superhuman reputation among his followers.
The real spoiler alert (you have time to look away) is that the movie packs up its cameras just before this moment is about to take place, ending the movie with Marley and the Wailers on that stage, but preferring to depict the peacemaking scene in archival video and pictures over the end credits. I would find it hard to believe that such a decision did not involve considerable debate, and I would be surprised if director Green and co. had not attempted to film the scene in question as well. As such, the end feels more like a premature fade than a grand climax - although it does serve to complete the arc of the story of Bob’s post-shooting exile, depicting him at peace with the world, and especially with his limited time left on it. As noted up top, One Love is not perfect; that tends to be the way with biopics, especially of the musical variety. But just as Robert Nesta Marley never underestimated the power of music to heal the world, don’t underestimate your own ability to understand, appreciate and hopefully enjoy the story that is told within this finely-honed focus on a remarkable man at the peak of his powers.
This piece on Screenrant went up literally in the last hour before I posted my review; I found it by accident while searching for some Marley pics. Apparently the usual difference on the film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes between critics ratings and viewer ratings is 5%; with One Love it is over 50%! “Some critics seemed to have wished for a splashier tribute to Marley,” observes Rachel Ulatowski, while “audiences praised the biopic as being accurate and the type of adaptation the singer would've been proud of.” A reminder to movie-makers and critics alike that adult audiences do not need blockbuster style films to make them happy.
The film does not have the time nor the remit to add scenes showing Nesta brought back a year later, returned to Kingston alongside his mother aged 12, stayed behind when she moved to the USA, joined her in his late teens the day after getting married to Rita, before finally deciding his heart was in Trenchtown and returned to Kingston to make his mark.
It tends to go uncommented that Seaga compiled, produced, recorded and wrote the sleeve notes for a 1950s album released on Folkways of “Folk in Jamaica” and was an early player as the music industry in Jamaica gathered steam.
Tony, thanks for the lengthy and informative review. Without it, I wouldn’t have taken to the time to see One Love in a theater, even though I’ve been a Marley fan since high school. The trailer didn’t do a great job of selling the movie. In it, I couldn’t see past Kingsley Ben-Adir to find Bob.
One Love is enjoyable, though it holds few surprises, and does some serious shoehorning, as when Marley superfluously mentions Marcia Griffiths and Judy Mowatt in absentia (to simply include their names somehow, since neither is ever given anything to add). You're right that excising a significant portion of Bob's life was a better idea than a cradle-to-grave story. Though I’m still scratching my head at the choice of events between the big concert tentpoles. The scene dedicated to concern over the cover art for Exodus… Was this really a sticking point? And even if so, was that the best use of those minutes of the film?
And it would it have been so hard to portray The Clash as they looked in ’77? It seems to me the outfits and stage background (with the Stuka plane or whatever) were from 1979. Nitpickery? Maybe. But your notes about how Punky London is always painted with one weak mono-color stroke are dead on. I sure wasn’t there, but one wouldn’t have to be to recognize the cliché.
It was a treat to see people I’ve met and interviewed portrayed in the movie, including Lee Jaffe and Junior Marvin. That’s a first for me. I cracked an even bigger smile seeing Aston Barrett Jr. - another interviewee and the sweetest guy on the block - playing his own father, who was someone I very much wanted to meet. A colleague who had the good fortune to interview Family Man told me once, "If you do, bring a translator... He speaks English, but..." I heard my friend's interview tape, and I could fathom about every fifth word. And that's only if those words were "riddim" or "mon."
But my big interest in One Love was seeing if one-time Wailers guitarist Donald Kinsey would be featured in any way. Though his tenure with Bob was short, I believe his part of the story is important. The filmmakers didn’t see it that way, apparently.
Donald was a long-time friend of mine, and a subject of a still incomplete documentary. You may know he also supported and recorded with Peter Tosh, Albert King, and others, as well as fronting his great family band, The Kinsey Report. With the saddest of timing, we lost Donald to COPD on February 6th of this year, a day that would have been Bob Marley's 79th birthday, and less than a week after Fams passed on.
Donald never saw One Love, where he is not name-checked and seen only in half-shadow in the rehearsal and concert scenes in the first act (that’s him with the hat and the red SG). From my conversations with him, I'm not sure how he might have reacted if he had seen the movie. I think he would have been gracious, but quick to point out how his recollections of the assassination attempt differed from the film. Biopic versions of events are often revised to improve the clarity and consistency of a script, of course. But Donald Kinsey was in the room on December 3, 1976, when the gunmen opened fire. His story of that dreadful moment and the days that followed would have been just as compelling an account as what we find in One Love.
Donald told me that, as we see in the movie, the musicians at Hope Road that evening were taking a break from rehearsal when terror struck. And Bob and Don Taylor had indeed adjourned to a first-floor kitchenette. But the shooters were not – at least not all – roaming the house looking for targets. Instead, Donald recalls them taking safe stances: Shooting into the house from outside the doors. The bullets, he said, were coming up from foot level, since Bob’s house was elevated at least three feet from the ground, and the shooters had not climbed the steps. As described in Timothy White’s book, Donald did jump behind a flight case to save himself from gunfire (though I resent how White described Donald as “cowering”). But, according to Donald, no one came to assist Bob and Don Taylor immediately after they were shot. In fact, both stayed on their feet for a while, running out of the kitchen area. At least 10 minutes passed before Donald felt it was safe to come out of his hiding place, and that’s when he found that Taylor had finally collapsed.
Condensing those details is no sin of the movie. But I wish they had used Donald Kinsey’s account of how Bob made the decision to keep his promise to appear at Smile Jamaica, as he told me in 2018:
“The day of that show, the police found out where I was, and said that Bob wanted to talk to me. This the day of the festival. So, they took me up to the Sheraton Hotel in Kingston. I talked to Bob by walkie-talkie and I could see the concert ground from the balcony of this hotel room. And Bob asked me, “Donald, what do you think?” Because he couldn't find everybody. Everybody was underground, man.
“So, I looked down there. It's like 80,000 people at night in Kingston. And they just tried to shoot up this man's house with everybody in there and I said to Bob, “You know, The Almighty has seen us through that shooting. Ain't no way he's going to abandon us at this point. If you want to do it, I'll do it with you.”
I pressed Donald on whether he believed his comments to Bob were the motivation for Bob to appear on stage that night. He was a bit sheepish about it: “I just told him what I told you.”
One Love, as I recall, gives credit for this encouragement to Bob’s Rastafarian ministers. And perhaps they also urged him to play that night. But those guys weren’t in the line of fire two days earlier. And they had a stake in seeing the most popular representative of their faith on a concert stage in front of tens of thousands. It was Bob and Donald and the rest of The Wailers who were possibly risking their lives to play a concert, not some mountain preacher. Had Bob been killed in front of the enormous crowd, the Rastafarians would have lost their angel, but gained a martyr. Of course they wanted him to play.
And what if Donald Kinsey was indeed the deciding factor? What if he had said to Bob, “Are you crazy? Somebody wants you dead. No way should you go anywhere near that crowd. Tell Blackwell to fuel up the jet.” Had Bob thought that way, his hero status would not have ascended to a new level. We would not have the images burned into our collective conscious of Nesta, The Messenger of The Lion Of Judah, opening his shirt to show the throng where he was wounded. Marley’s path would surely have been different without his commitment to Smile Jamaica, and who can say if the Exodus album would have been written and recorded?
Of course, the movie script wanted to sustain Marley’s unwavering commitment to Rastafarianism. But other scenes make that point just as well.
Personal interest and quibbles aside, One Love really doesn’t let the viewer or the massive Marley legacy down. If nothing else works for the audience, the pounding, pristine, irresistible soundtrack reminds us just why Bob looms so large even today, and why no performer is more synonymous with any genre than he is with reggae. I recall a Steel Pulse album review decades back, where the writer opened with, “A friend asked me what new reggae album he should buy, and I said, ‘So… You have all the Marley albums, then?’”
Thanks again for the great article, and the place for some of us to spew.
I actually visited Bob in the London flat, on Better Badges business, introduced by Pepe Judah of the !2 Tribes. Claudie Massop was there, didn't say much, plus a wizened old dread with a staff called Brother Jacob, who declaimed at length.
What really surprised me was the music playing, ethereal reggae, unlike anything I'd ever heard. I later figured out this was the Congos record, on pre-release.
Bob's thing was he wanted me to make badges for the Ethiopian royal family, for them to distribute to loyalists back home. I thought this might be a bit of a dubious proposition, given the Red Terror, but agreed.
I duly liaised with one Keyet Mekonnen, who would visit the BB garage, and have me merge photos of Selassie and the Crown Prince, etc. She was a tough client. Everytime she came back she ask for changes. This was in the heyday of 78, and I was busy. Finally, I said, "Lady, you figure out the design, and we'll make the badges!". Then I actually went off to do merch on the Iggy Pop TV Eye tour, of Europe. She may have revisited without joy, I don't know.
The day I flew back, just as I arrived. Bob, and also John Holt, showed up. He was vex, as they say, about me being insufficiently cooperative. We had a something of a spirited discussion on the ethics of selling rasta pins to punks. This was brought to a full stop when he stalked to the other end of the garage, and picked up a badge that was lying there. This happened to be a current job, a backstage pass badge for the Graham Parker tour of Australia, large, black, red, yellow, green stripes, it said 'I SHOT THE FERRET'. My workers stifled mirth, and a speechless Bob departed.
That was the end of the project, although BB did continue to work with the 12 Tribes.