Big Picture Big Sound

Heard more than anything else over the course of "Bob Marley: One Love"'s 104-minute runtime, not including the subject's music, is one character asking another where Bob Marley is. Which is fitting, apparently; according to Kingsley Ben-Adir, who portrays Marley in co-writer/director Reinaldo Marcus Green's new biopic, Marley was never one to sit still. He was always dancing, going for a run, or finding a nearby football scrimmage to work his way into. And that's not to mention how often Marley was writing, rehearsing, and recording the music that made him world-famous, often in studios and countries that he couldn't necessarily call his own

It appears, through "One Love"'s lens, at least, that Marley - seen in modern times as a man forever backdropped by the red, green, and yellow colors of Jamaica - was never in one place for very long. The film takes place between 1976 and 1978, and over this period, we see Marley, yes, in Jamaica, but also in London, Paris, Belgium, Denmark, et al. It's as if the film, without ever implying that Marley was a man without country, knows that there is more to the artist than what history tends to paint him as: a man perpetually holding a joint in one hand and calling for peace with two fingers on another. If only "One Love" went to any identifiable lengths to prove that, rather than just stating it, plainly and poorly.

Indeed, our long, frustrating musical biopic nightmare rages on, as "One Love" never does much beyond scratching the surface of what made Bob Marley skyrocket to fame in the late 70s, let alone why his fame was so unique at the time it was surging. To have a basic understanding of Marley's life is to have a basic understanding of "One Love," though viewers shouldn't expect to leave the film with much more than just that. The epidemic that has swept most biopics these days has taken another victim as Green's film limits its ambitions by remaining overly broad in its narrative efforts, and falls back on tricks we've seen before when attempting to mine real emotion out of the darker moments of Marley's rise.

One of those instances comes fairly early on in the film, when two men sneak into Marley's home and attempt to assassinate the musician, as well as his manager (Anthony Welsh), bandmates/friends, and wife, Rita (played with magnetism by Lashana Lynch, despite the script's limitations). Though Marley and co. survived the attack, the message sent by the intruders was clear: Marley's pro-peace agenda was unwelcome in Jamaica during a time of political unrest. That this unrest is introduced in a furious barrage of news footage depicting the violence sets a tone for what follows for the remainder of the film: not a reliance on montages, per se, but a reliance on the easy way out.

To the cast and crew's credit, especially Ben-Adir and Lynch, there is a level of commitment to the Jaimacan parlance that many other films would tend to eschew - the vernacular is faithful and the accents are thick, but not necessarily laid on thick nor overdone. Underdone, though, is the film's overall approach to Marley's trauma and the tribulations endured while preaching unity when the state of his home country was anything but.

When Green and cinematographer Robert Elswit's camera stops to center on Ben-Adir's Marley, presumably deep in thought, it doesn't let the actor do the work that comes with portraying his character's true demons, nor what Ben-Adir has proven himself perfectly capable of doing so far in his young career. Instead, the film cuts to flashbacks of a traumatic childhood memory - or is it a vision? - where a young Marley is encircled by a ring of fire as a man on horseback tramples toward him. Other times, "One Love" cuts to a repetitive image of Marley leaning on his mother's shoulder in the back of a car as his family flees a dangerous part of his homeland for greener pastures. Then, all of a sudden, we're back with Marley in the present day, as he prepares to go on stage to perform, or to write another song, or to swipe away darkness in favor of a sidebar about what the music means and why audiences will come to love it.

It's as if Green and his three co-writers forgot that a big part of show-and-tell is telling by showing, not the other way around. It's a common misstep, especially in run-of-the-mill biopics like this one, which tend to prefer rushing through history in order to serve a purpose loftier, more meaningful. Yet they often tend to do this by force-feeding one-liners and montages - there's that word again - that sum up significant periods in a swifter, less impactful manner.

Marley's fame came gradually, but "One Love" abridges his story to a two-year period, bookended by his attempted assassination and his 1978 One Love Peace Concert upon returning to Jamaica. A major European tour and the success of his album, "Exodus," both launched him to worldwide superstardom; here, these career tent poles are reduced to a matter of minutes. Along the way, Marley is betrayed by someone in his inner circle and is told, "You swim in pollution, you get polluted." Earlier in the film, when he doubts whether or not playing his "Smile Jamaica" show in the aftermath of the shooting at his home will be as effective as once intended, he is encouraged, "If you don't play the show, they will..." - whatever that means.

I suppose these sorts of moments are the ones that look good on paper. But in execution, they instill a dull, emotionless tone into a film that already feels all but devoid of the life its subject wore on his sleeve like a badge of honor. One sequence - in which Marley and his band, the Wailers, crack the melody and lyrics to "Exodus", the song that would also serve as the title for the aforementioned 1977 album - does manage to generate some hope that the film might be making a turn towards vibrancy. It shows Marley in his truest form, alive and captivating, dancing and editing in one fell swoop that fuels "One Love" with a fire it had otherwise been searching for ever since its opening credits. Yet that verve soon fizzles out, making way for another painfully standard supercut, another cliché, another reminder of what a better film would do instead.

While not unengaging, or at least attempting to entertain, the overarching problem with "One Love" is the problem with a lot of biopics that have come before it and will come after: It's not particularly inventive, and thus veers into the territory of the overly safe and telegraphed. If there's one thing Bob Marley never did, it's talk the talk without walking the walk. Sometimes, it's hard to tell whether "One Love" is bothering to do either.