If you have seen the 2007 Jake Kasdan film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, it might be very hard for you to watch a Hollywood biopic of a famous musician ever again. That film skewered biopic cliches and tropes that continue to be recycled every time there is a biopic about a famous musician. The musician has to think about their entire life before they take the stage at the big concert, the film always starts right before said big concert. There’s always drug abuse, infidelity, dramatic highs and lows, and we always follow the subject from cradle to grave. There’s always an on-screen graphic of the musician’s big hit rising up on the charts. And there’s many on screen title cards showing you locations the person is traveling to on tour, despite that not really mattering since these films are almost always shot in the same one location. We do all of this again and again, and rarely is the biopic mold challenged in any way.

Audiences in general, however, don’t seem to care about this. Bohemian Rhapsody made almost a billion dollars and won several Oscars, despite being terrible. I Wanna Dance With Somebody, the 2022 biopic of Whitney Houston, was a hit with audiences, despite tremendous glossing over on many aspects of the singer’s life. Rocketman, the biopic of singer Elton John played around with the structure and was more honest about the singer’s internal life, so that one gets a pass from me. However, for the most part these movies are all the same. Today, I’m going to talk about the latest film from Reinaldo Marcus Green, who last directed the film King Richard, another biopic that glossed over some important details of the subject’s lives. And well, I’m not gonna make any friends with this one. Let’s talk about Bob Marley One Love.

The year is 1976. Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is about to play a peace concert in politically divided Jamaica, in which a crucial election is about to take place, where his voice is considered massively influential. Despite an act of violence aimed at Marley and a group of his family and friends, he remains adamant in his mission to portray a unifying message. We also (sort of) follow his relationship with his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch) and begin to skim the surface of the intricacies of their marriage. We also see Marley’s meteoric rise and growth in popularity and follow him until the climactic big concert.

When I saw the film’s introduction from Bob Marley’s son, Ziggy Marley, who is a producer on this film, that showed before the Paramount logo, I suspected we might be in trouble here. And I was right to be concerned. Bob Marley: One Love feels like every moment of it was signed off on by the family of the legendary musician, and the parts we gloss over feel very intentional and calculated. Like I said, the same was true with the recent Whitney Houston biopic, and this leaves me very worried about the forthcoming Amy Winehouse biopic. Because this is a trend full of yikes, and it continues to feel more ghoulish and disturbing.

I didn’t go into One Love with very much knowledge about Marley and the kind of person he was beyond the music, and this film had no real interest in telling me anything. The political uprising happening at the start of the film in Jamaica is not really explained at all, and I know the world is in a constant state of political turmoil, but the film could have done something to paint the picture a little better, so I would have understood the stakes of what was going on in the world at this moment in history. I was not familiar with either of these political candidates and what they stood for and how each side was using or not using Marley to deliver their intended messages. But then again, I don’t know if this film was interested in getting into all of that either. Because we need to get to that all important scene where you see Marley come up with the ideas for the big songs!

The images you see of the real Bob Marley at the end crawl illuminate the Hollywoodization of this story. In hiring a traditionally handsome actor like Kingsley Ben-Adir to play a legendary figure who never had a six pack in his life, feels disingenuous. Ben-Adir does an admirable job but never feels like he is given the proper cinematic real estate to properly explore this man, and what drove him to create the music he is remembered for. Lashana Lynch as Rita Marley, all but walks away with this entire movie. I would have liked to have known more about that relationship, her internal life, and what drove their life together. He also fathered many children with different partners. We know nothing about his children. I’m not sure how many children he had, to be honest. The film does not tell you.

Bob Marley: One Love might improve slightly as the film progresses. In the third act, there are glimmers of what this film might have been if it took some chances and didn’t feel so narratively confined by the rockstar biopic formula. Had this been the case, we might be dealing with a properly developed portrait of this important man. But in the end, this film runs just over 90 minutes. And that is not enough time to fully appreciate the legacy he has left behind. In fact, the simplification of his story almost feels disrespectful.

One Love contains just about every rockstar biopic cliche you could possibly imagine. There is almost nothing to connect to emotionally, beyond the presence of the music itself, and that’s just lazy. It’s also worth mentioning that Kingsley Ben-Adir does not do his own singing, which is probably for the best. I wondered if this film was simply not completed by the end of Oscar season 2023, or if it was positioned here because the studio knew this had no shot in hell of being in the Academy Awards conversation. It feels like it would have just been a distraction if it were released in the middle of Oscar season, because this for sure is not taking any trophies home.

Bob Marley One Love is a film that thinks its viewer is stupid. And maybe it’s right. This film made about $50 million over its opening five-day weekend. It has an A Cinemascore rating, and a Rotten Tomatoes audience score in the 90s. People clapped at the end of my screening! We deserve this. We don’t deserve actual good movies about our famous musicians. This is the bullshit Hollywood keeps churning out, and most audiences are happy if they leave the theater humming the familiar tunes, regardless if they gained any deeper insight at all about the subject matter. I would like to see a good documentary about Bob Marley that actually teaches the viewer something, or makes us see something about the singer in a different light, but this ain’t it. The overall point of this seems to be getting Bob Marley’s Spotify numbers up.