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What went wrong with Bob Marley: One Love?

Despite the fact that Bob Marley: One Love was, producer Ziggy Marley says, a labour of love, a slew of negative reviews and limp early box office numbers have already poured in. But how do you make a music biopic about someone who was, to many, far more than just a musician?

That biopic tells the story of his father, the legendary Jamaican reggae artist who helped to cement both the genre and the closely associated Rastafari religion in the public consciousness. The film focuses on a few years near the end of the musician's life, when he left a home country falling toward a possible civil war, and crafted Exodus — declared by Time magazine in 1999 to be the greatest album of the 20th century. "In the age of the studios, the bowdlerization of life stories was essentially a response to ongoing threats of censorship," the New Yorker review explains, somewhat serendipitously — even as it argues against the lazy trend of criticizing biopics just for leaving things out.

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