How to embody in the cinema a global icon with an aura as powerful as Bob Marley, a face worn on millions of t-shirts, author of songs listened to by millions of people?
Forty-three years after his death from cancer, at just 36 years old, his heirs, starting with his widow Rita and his eldest son Ziggy, have finally found the right casting and the right angle.
“One Love” recounts two key years of his life, which separate the assassination attempt in Jamaica in 1976 from which he miraculously escaped with his wife and his manager, to the recording of the album “Exodus”, in 1978, three years before his death in Miami.
The first scenes of the film are a little disturbing.
The English actor Kingsley-Ben Adir, discovered in "Vera's Investigations" and revealed by the series "Peaky Blinders", may well be 37 years old and have obvious charisma, but he seems a little tender to us to play the reggae singer immersed in full civil war in Kingston.
But we are ultimately taken by its story and its music, fortunately omnipresent.
The narration is certainly classic but rhythmic, with back and forth between his poor childhood, his meeting with Rita, the revelation of Rastafarianism and this period as tense as it is rich where he fights to impose peace in his country and record during his exile in London the album that would make him a star, “Exodus”, in 1977, with the hits “Jamming” and “One Love”.
No angelism and that's so much the better
His classics follow one another, the studio and concert scenes are quite realistic.
We follow him during his European tour in 1977, we quickly see him during the football match in Paris played with French journalists where he injures his toe, an injury which will reveal his cancer.
And the film does not turn a blind eye, as one might fear, to his heavy consumption of cannabis nor to his strained relations with Rita and his outbursts of violence, in particular against his manager Don Taylor, accused of having embezzled money .
If you don't know your Marley inside out, you'll learn something.
Editor's note:
3.5/5
“Bob Marley, One Love”,
by Reinaldo Marcus Green, with Kingsley Ben-Adir, Lashana Lynch... 1h47.