"...despite the Homeric quantities of marijuana consumed, the film portrays an angry, militant Marley, for whom music has become a means of imposing unity and peace..."

Opening in 1976 against a backdrop of Jamaica’s political violence, Bob Marley: One Love (12A) is by no means a typical music biopic.

When Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) and his wife, Rita (Lashana Lynch), are gunned down as they prepare for the ‘Smile Jamaica’ peace concert, Bob sends Rita and their children to America to ensure their safety before relocating to London with his band, The Wailers, where they set about composing the album that would become the iconoclastic, trail-blazing Exodus.

Reinaldo Marcus Green’s film is distinctly lacking in the laidback ‘irie vibe’ we might have expected from a movie about reggae’s undisputed king: despite the Homeric quantities of marijuana consumed, the film portrays an angry, militant Marley, for whom music has become a means of imposing unity and peace as espoused by the Rastafarian religion.

Those expecting a warts-and-all expose of Marley’s personal life will be disappointed; the focus is very much on the public figure as the artist attempts to put his gift to work for the common good.

In this Reinaldo Marcus Green largely succeeds, creating a raw but powerful account of Marley’s singular vision, with Kingsley Ben-Adir in superb form as the flawed genius who almost single-handedly brought reggae to the wider world.

The script is frequently rough-and-ready in the way it shoehorns in certain songs, and few of the performances, with the exception of Lashana Lynch, match the intensity of Ben-Adir, but for the most part this is a satisfying biopic that succeeds handsomely despite its necessarily broad strokes.