Bob Marley: One Love
This biopic casts Bob Marley as an almost messianic figure, but offers a very narrow interpretation of its protagonist’s politics.
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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.
Content warnings: Death; Narcotics; Anti-Blackness.
Note: Given that, at time of writing, Bob Marley: One Love is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.
Bob Marley: One Love commences in 1976, with Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) getting ready to play ‘Smile Jamaica’, a concert organised in opposition to the country’s worsening politically-related gang violence, with his band The Wailers. Yet in advance of the concert, gunmen attack the compound where he and the band are staying, injuring both him and his wife Rita (Lashana Lynch), who is one of The Wailers’ backing singers, the I Threes.
Bob Marley subsequently decamps with The Wailers to London where, with the support of Chris Blackwell (James Norton), whose Island Records label they are signed to, they begin work on writing and recording their Exodus album that will launch Marley to genuinely global stardom. Yet his rising fame and the glamourous lifestyle that accompanies it takes its toll on Bob’s relationship with Rita. At the same time, a foot injury sustained while playing football reveals the parlous state of his health, while in his absence, political violence continues to escalate back in Jamaica.
Capturing Marley’s zenith
Made with the cooperation of Marley’s estate – Rita Marley and her and Bob’s children Ziggy and Cedella are listed as executive producers – Bob Marley: One Love is a broadly conventional biopic. It uses the approach of focusing on a particularly momentous period in Marley’s life, into which a number of key themes and developments can be condensed and explored. These include his place in 1970s Jamaican politics; his engagement with and embrace by a European audience; his writing of many of his best-known songs, featured heavily and mostly diegetically on the soundtrack; and his illness, prefiguring his early death.
This is fleshed out through flashbacks to Bob’s childhood and adolescence that give us a greater understanding of his character and motivations in the mid-1970s present. We are shown fragments of his being raised alone by his mother, Cedella Malcolm (Nadine Marshall), after they are abandoned by his white soldier father; his burgeoning romance with Rita; his embrace of Rastafarianism; and the beginnings of his music career.
The biopic’s truthiness is further emphasised through interspersal with real-life footage of Marley, including his instigating an awkward handshake between Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, leaders of the violently opposed People’s National Party and Jamaica Labour Party respectively, at the 1978 One Love Peace Concert. Written pre and post-scripts further serve to ensconce the film’s events in the broader narrative of Marley’s life.
Marley as messiah figure
The film tells Marley’s story in a manner that casts him nakedly as a quasi-messianic figure. Integrating artistic with spiritual purity, he explains that ‘You can’t separate the music and the message’, as he tries to make an album that is sonically and lyrically transcendent. While Marley is primarily concerned with prophesising, the music industry is determined to aggrandise him as above his band’s music and audience, something that is anathema to him. ‘I ain’t no superstar,’ he laughingly insists. He has temptations routinely put in his way by the musician’s lifestyle, which he must overcome. He is also seemingly preordained to suffer, from the initial attempt on his life to his foreshadowed death, and in doing so without reproach or desire for vengeance, serves to redeem his assailants, Jamaica, and the world for their sins.
Other characters likewise fulfil roles with clear biblical analogues. Rita is a similarly self-sacrificial figure, who at different times serves to remind Bob of the need to retain his purity; to care for him and encourage him to care for himself; and to ultimately augment his lionisation: ‘Sometimes the messenger has to become the message’, she tells him. Bandmates Tyrone Downie (Toison Cole), Aston Barrett (played by his son Aston Barrett Jr.), and Carlton Barrett (Hector Lewis), meanwhile, function almost as apostles. Affectionately calling Marley ‘Skipper’, they are forever awaiting his guidance in the studio, accompanying him in his leisure activities, and re-encapsulating his points in conversations. Manager Don Taylor (Anthony Welsh) seems equally integral a part of their entourage, but by contrast is ultimately cast more in the role of Judas.
All of this is reinforced through persistent verbal and visual presence of the accoutrements of Rastafarianism: dreadlocks; references to Jah, Haile Selassie, and I-and-I; groundings and nyabinghi drumming; cannabis smoking; and Marley’s recurring visions. As discussed below, it comes with a rather vague presentation of the substance of the faith itself, beyond emphasising Marley’s spirituality. The trip to Europe does offers though an opportunity to place it in dialogue with Western Christianity, through discussions of the Book of Exodus and its significance to the Wailers’ record (in response to condescending dismissal by a white record executive).
Obscuring Marley’s politics
Beyond this, however, Bob Marley: One Love offers only a very partial and sanitised version of Marley’s politics, and his place in the global politics of the 1970s. ‘You see reggae music come fi unify the people’, he explains, and the film very much presents his message as being about unity and peace, and the disavowal of violence. Again, this is articulated in a manner comprehensible to a white, Western audience. We see Marley and the Wailers attend a Clash concert, and parallels being drawn between urban disorder in Kingston and London – tropes familiar to anyone well versed in the history and mythology of British punk rock.1
Where race is addressed, however, it is done so in a fragmentary manner. There is the matter of Marley’s abandonment by his father, and flashes of racial tension and discrimination when they are in London, but racism is generally presented as a bad thing that results from the sort of individual prejudice Marley rises above. He and his bandmates experience some pushback from record executives over their more idealistic ambitions, especially a putative tour of Africa, but in Chris Blackwell he has a cautious but loyal white ally who helps them overcome any such opposition.
Ignoring structures of racial oppression renders what the film tells us about Marley and his politics and significance partly devoid of meaning. There is some discussion between him and others of him being biracial, but no real reflection on the broader issue of colourism in Jamaican society that lends his skin tone particularly salience, and which makes the included footage of the real-life Marley with Manley and Seaga – two extremely light-skinned men dominating the politics of a majority Black country – rather incongruous. Nor is the violence Marley opposes connected with the legacy of colonialism and pervasive anti-Blackness. We get hints of Rastafarianism’s rejection of white supremacy, and avowal of Black togetherness, but little of its sophisticated reworking of Biblical scripture in pursuit of Black liberation in Jamaica and globally.2
These omissions are set into sharpest relief when we hear the music of Bob Marley itself on the film’s soundtrack. Particular emotional weight is placed (anachronistically) on him singing ‘Redemption Song’, the opening lyrics of which are:
Old pirates, yes, they rob I
Sold I to the merchant ships
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit
Bob Marley: One Love often plays almost as a religious parable, but is deeply forgetful of this original sin.
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On this topic, see Stephen Duncombe and Maxwell Tremblay (eds.), White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race (London and New York: Verso, 2011).
For a deeper exploration of these themes, see:
Monique Bedasse, Jah Kingdom: Rastafarians, Tanzania, and Pan-Africanism in the age of Decolonization (Chapel Hill, NC: University of Carolina Press, 2017).
Vivaldi Jean-Marie, Rastafari Cosmology and the Ethos of Blackness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023).