Bob Marley: One Love (2024)
★★★½ — Bob Marley: One Love (2024)
Bob Marley: One Love arrived in cinemas in February 2024, released through Paramount Pictures in partnership with Tuff Gong Pictures, the label Bob Marley himself founded in Kingston, Jamaica, and Plan B Entertainment. That involvement of Tuff Gong, now run by the Marley family, was widely noted before release, raising questions about whether a family-approved production could ever be truly candid about its subject. The film covers roughly the period surrounding the recording and release of the 1977 album Exodus, framed around Marley's survival of an assassination attempt in December 1976 and his subsequent self-imposed exile in London. It is, in other words, a biopic that plants its flag in one of the most politically charged and personally turbulent chapters of Marley's life, which makes the creative choices all the more interesting to unpick. For anyone curious how it sits alongside other recent music-focused documentaries and dramatisations, my reviews of Amazing Grace and 8 Mile are worth a read for some points of comparison on how the genre can succeed or stumble.
The director is Reinaldo Marcus Green, whose previous work includes the Will Smith tennis drama King Richard (2021), a film that earned considerable awards attention and showed Green to be comfortable with the prestige biopic format: polished but unremarkable, warm but conventional. Whether those instincts serve a figure as resistant to easy categorisation as Bob Marley is very much the question the film puts on the table. Marley's story spans Jamaican politics, Rastafarian theology, pan-African idealism and a catalogue of music that has outlasted virtually every commercial trend of the past fifty years. Condensing any portion of that into a 104-minute studio picture is a formidable task by any measure.
Leading the cast is Kingsley Ben-Adir, the British actor who has built a reputation for physically and vocally committed performances in roles that require him to inhabit rather than merely portray. Alongside him, Lashana Lynch plays Rita Marley, a figure whose own strength and resilience run through the story as a grounding presence. James Norton and Tosin Cole appear in supporting roles, and Umi Myers also features in the ensemble. The film had the reggae catalogue to draw on directly, which is no small asset, and the music is woven throughout the running time as you would expect from any treatment of Marley's life.
Bob Marley: One Love, despite its noble intentions and a few powerful moments, feels like a missed opportunity to truly honour the depth and spirit of an icon. Ben Kingsley gives a dignified performance as Bob Marley but as a man who just CANNOT be emulated it ultimately fell flat. There’s one scene (Selassie reaching out his hand toward the camera) that absolutely wrecked me. As someone who’s lived by his teachings for decades, that moment wasn’t just cinematic, it was spiritual. I felt it in my chest. It brought tears to my eyes. But beyond that, the film struggles. So much of Bob’s life, the complexity of his faith, the fire of his activism, the pain of exile, the politics of Exodus, the roots of Rastafari, is glossed over or simplified into Hollywood-safe soundbites. The pacing rushes through pivotal moments like they’re checking boxes: “reggae hits,” “near-death assassination,” “Zimbabwe independence concert.” Where’s the soul? Where’s the revolution? You can’t capture a man like Bob Marley with surface-level reverence, he was a prophet, a rebel, a mystic, and reducing him to a sectional biopic does him a disservice. The music is incredible (how could it not be?), and Kingsley tries, but the story lacks truth, nuance, and real emotional weight. It’s polished, respectful, and ultimately hollow. You can’t emulate an enigma, you can only try to understand him. This film doesn’t go deep enough.
For me, that single scene aside, this is a film I left feeling a little deflated by, which is a strange sensation when the subject is someone whose music has genuinely meant something to me over the years. There is real care visible in the production, and Ben-Adir clearly worked hard, but care and effort do not always add up to truth on screen. If anything, it made me want to go back to the records themselves, which is perhaps the most honest thing I can say about it. Sometimes the best a biopic can do is point you back toward the source. Whether that counts as a success is a question worth sitting with.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2025-09-18
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Bob Marley: One Love (2024) on YouTube
Where to watch
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