'Bob Marley: One Love': a conventional 'biopic', saved by the vigor of music

When approaching the cinematographic biography of a popular music star, those responsible always have two essential options: cover an entire existence or, at least, a broad journey that helps understand the significance not only of their music but also of your personality;

or focus on a much shorter period of life, the primary one in its artistic aspect or in its personal core, but which ends up forming a multifaceted portrait.

In the first case, the greatest danger is that of superficiality: you go all the way, but you go over everything without sinking the knife into anything.

In the second case, the threat comes because not all artists have an imposing dramatic core that encompasses them as artists and as human beings.

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In

Bob Marley: One Love, a biopic

of the legendary Jamaican musician, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and produced, among others, by Brad Pitt and Marley's widow and singing children (Rita, Ziggy and Cedella), they have not yet decided on one or the other option and they have wanted to cover both.

They have chosen the correct period, a short time span that goes from the prelude to the December 1976 concert at the National Heroes Park in Kingston (Jamaica), converted into a political event from the moment the organizer, the then first Minister Michael Manley, called elections when it was not yet appropriate, just the day after Marley's approval to play at the event, and thus take advantage of the star's momentum, until the

One Love

peace concert,

in April 1978, this one, yes, organized by the singer himself in search of national reconciliation, at a time when Jamaica was on the brink of the Civil War.

A year and a half in which Marley's personal and artistic life took a huge turn and in which the events that occurred (of all kinds: musical, political, criminal and even health) had enough dramatic significance to leave him well defined there.

Lashana Lynch and Kingsley Ben-Amir, as Rita and Bob Marley, in the film.

However, in a film that Terence Winter, one of the prestigious screenwriters of

The Sopranos

and creator of

Boardwalk Empire,

began writing, it seems that too many creators have ended up getting involved, including the director himself, Marcus Green, and it is not They have made do with that year and a half.

They have filled it with insubstantial

flashbacks

(musical, religious and even soap operas) that try to round out Marley's drawing, but that only cloud the whole.

Among other things, because the academic staging by the director, already demonstrated in

The Williams Method

(the

biopic

about the tennis-playing sisters Venus and Serena around their father), becomes slick and somewhat bombastic with that dichotomy between the absence of the biological father (Marley was a bastard, the son of a white British soldier of whom he knew nothing and of whom he only kept a photo) and the presence of a kind of spiritual father, recreated in the ghostly figure of the Ethiopian leader Haile Selassie, whom the musician never stops reading and idolizing.

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Now, and although Marley's womanizing side is also conspicuous by its absence

(No Woman no Cry),

not everything is so reprehensible in the film.

As the canons dictate, it is the music that ends up dominating and in that sense the pleasure of the creative process of an album as legendary as

Exodus is gratifying,

also conceived in that year and a half of dread and fury, of pain and success.

Bob Marley: One Love,

closer to the idolized lightness of

Bohemian Rhapsody

and some titles from the early 2000s (mainly,

Ray)

than to the energy of

Rocketman,

may appeal to lovers of

more conventional

biopics .

Marley's imposing personality and the musical, social and political vigor of his songs come to the rescue of the film.

BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE

Director:

Reinaldo Marcus Green.

Starring:

Kingsley Ben-Amir, Lashana Lynch, James Norton, Anthony Welsh. 

Genre:

biopic

.

USA, 2024.

Duration:

104 minutes.

Premiere: February 14.

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