The Bob Marley Biopic ‘One Love’ Is a Total Mess

Bob Marley was a true legend: a brilliant artist and performer, a profound thinker, a devoted activist, and a man tragically taken from the world at the young age of 36. Some people are born stars and exude radiance that cannot be bottled. Marley was one of them. So it’s a terrible shame that in One Love (in theaters Feb. 14), the long-awaited biopic on his life and career, he is upstaged by a wig.

Bad wigs are a blight on movies. Think of the mousy blonde monstrosity Michelle Williams donned in Venom, Anne Hathaway’s oversized platinum blond layers in Brokeback Mountain, the stiff helmets draped over the entire cast of Twilight, and, of course, the many terrible wigs that suggest Nicole Kidman’s hairstylist has a long-standing vendetta against her. Even by those standards the talented Kingsley Ben-Adir has been set up for failure. To play Marley, he’s been saddled with a hair-piece—a poor imitation of the singer’s famous dreadlocks—that is somehow too wide, too short, and never convincingly attached to his scalp. No matter how talented Ben-Adir otherwise is on stage or nailing the melody of “Jamming,” the illusion is shattered every painfully distracting time he moves his head.

One Love follows Marley in the final years of his life. We meet him when he’s already Jamaica’s most glittering star but is being targeted by armed gangs and is shot in his home. (The culprit is played by Michael Ward of Empire of Light and Lover’s Rock fame, inexplicably cast in a near-dialogue-free role.) While Marley survives the attack with only minor injuries, his wife, Rita (the always phenomenal Lashana Lynch), is seriously hurt; she’s saved only by her own dreadlocks, which catch the bullet—an unintentionally funny detail that further draws attention to the wigs. In the wake of the attack, Marley relocates to the relative safety of London to record new music. There, he faces police brutality and creative differences, sparring with a record executive played by James Norton (who, like Ward, is too big a name for such a small, thankless role), while his relationship with Rita is strained by his myriad infidelities.

Thankfully, we do get to hear much of Marley’s wonderful music performed in recording studios and on stage. But some of it is heavy-handedly wedged into the film, as when “No Woman No Cry” plays while Marley sits sadly by Rita’s hospital bed. One Love gives plenty of weight to the personal and professional relationship between Marley and Rita (who vocally supported the singer as a member of his band, The Wailers), and the actors develop a convincing chemistry that speaks to the rich history between the two. But the arc of their dynamic feels incomplete, in part because not enough screentime is afforded to Rita’s dreams beyond the relationship.

It’s hard to say what went wrong here. It wasn’t a matter of credentials, as One Love was written by Terence Winter (The Sopranos, The Wolf of Wall Street) and shepherded to the screen by Plan B, the production company behind 12 Years A Slave and Moonlight. Somehow, that creative team has struck a bizarre balance between Marley’s personal and public lives that suggests someone accidentally deleted 25 percent of the film. We see Marley playing football in a London park, going to bars, giving his thoughts on the artwork for his 1977 album Exodus. And we hear him express his dream of touring Africa and bringing together Jamaica’s opposing political leaders, which… Bob Marley actually did! Don’t those key moments of public triumph warrant depiction, too, especially as they happened during the exact timeframe the film dramatizes?

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In his last movie, the Oscar-winning biopic King Richard, director Reinaldo Marcus Green took a unique angle on a similarly famous career, avoiding a greatest-hits summary of Venus and Serena Williams’ successes in favor of exploring their origins through their father’s ambition. Here, Green has made something closer to the Bohemian Rhapsody-style Wikipedia entry he avoided with that movie; there is no cohesive theme beyond “some of the things that happened to Bob Marley from 1976 until 1981.”

One Love is a handsome albeit visually indistinct film lacking the unbridled creative spirit of its subject. Even with an outstanding central performance from Ben-Adir, it never feels like the definitive Bob Marley biopic. Maybe at some point in the not-so-distant future, someone else will turn his extraordinary life into an extraordinary movie. They can start by investing more in the wigs.

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