The Ballad of Bob and Rita

On the way to the cinema to see One Love last night, my thoughts went back to 1967, and buying the Wailers’ “Put It On” on an Island 45 at the West Indian record shop on Union Street in Nottingham, near the bus station. And to 1972, and spending hours at Harry J’s studio in Kingston, listening to them recording tracks for Catch A Fire, sharing Chris Blackwell’s pleasure as he realised what a good decision he’d made when he advanced them — in a move so unusual in the Jamaican record industry as to be unique — enough money to make an album. Who could have imagined then that Bob Marley, having first become a global symbol, would eventually turn into an industry, the generator of posthumous books, exhibitions, a musical and now a feature film?

So I was going to the film slightly reluctantly, in a mood of mild pessimism, even cynicism. How sensible, after all, is it to expect Hollywood to treat something you know a bit and care quite a lot about with sensitivity and respect? An hour and a half later I emerged in a very different frame of mind.

Reinaldo Marcus Green’s film concentrates on one short period of Marley’s life, from his shooting by political gunmen two days before a planned Peace Concert in December 1976 through the 18 months in London during which he recorded Exodus before returning home for the One Love concert, in which he stood between the prime minister, Michael Manley, and the leader of the opposition, Edward Seaga, and made them join hands.

It isn’t a biopic, although there are flashbacks to Marley’s early years: to the departure of his father, to his introduction to the cult of Rastafari, to the day the producer Clement Dodd invited the nascent Wailers into the studio. The earliest of these are framed, very effectively, as dreamlike childhood memories. But the bulk of the film concentrates on the narrow span of time in which he rose to his fullest artistic height (Exodus is his What’s Going On or Innervisions) while first surviving the would-be assassins’ bullets and then receiving the diagnosis of the cancer that would kill him in 1981, aged 36.

No praise is too high for Kingsley Ben-Adir, the British actor playing Marley. Ben-Adir, who portrayed Malcolm X in the brilliant One Night in Miami a few years ago, doesn’t look much like Marley, and his speaking voice is deeper, but he finds the physical litheness, the fleeting expressions and the inflections of speech, and the distinctive air of watchfulness, that evoke the man very clearly and accurately.

He’s well matched by Lashana Lynch as Rita Marley, Bob’s wife, the mother of three of his 11 children, and a member (with Judy Mowatt and Marcia Griffiths) of the I-Threes, his backing singers. Lynch does the long-suffering thing with a light touch and a range of nuance to match that of Ben-Adir. The family’s involvement in the production might call the accuracy of the depiction of their relationship into question, but the two actors make you believe in it for an hour and a half, at least, giving the film its emotional core.

The dramatis personae includes many of the characters who made contributions to Bob’s life, from Mortimer Planno, the Rasta philosopher, through Joe Higgs, his musical mentor, and Gilly the cook to Neville Garrick, the brilliant graphic designer, who died last year. And, of course, the musicians, who populate the scenes in rehearsals and recording studios that bring the songs from Exodus fully to life. It helps to have Aston Barrett Jr, one of Family Man’s sons, playing bass, but the actor-musicians playing Tyrone Downie, Carlton Barrett, Seeco Patterson, Junior Marvin and the rest are completely convincing, as is the depiction of the atmosphere within Island’s London studios.

The film is unfair, I think, on Chris Blackwell, who is played by James Norton — a reasonable match in visual terms, but coming across as far smoother and more superficial and ingratiating than the real thing. Blackwell’s concentration on Marley’s career eventually brought him the enmity of Bunny Livingston and Peter Tosh, but his vision and commitment created the opportunity for Jamaican music, spearheaded by the Wailers, to establish itself as a creative contributor to the music of the world.

But, you know, this is a story about black creativity and culture, told for once by black people, and if it’s the white people — record executives, promotion people and journalists — who look like the outsiders, then that’s more than fine. The use throughout of unsubtitled Jamaican patois is a way of making people like me aware that we’re being invited to enter another world.

And, of course, you come out of the cinema with the music in your ears, brilliantly rendered: the war cries and lamentations and songs of seduction and redemption, all still gloriously full of that defiant sweetness.