Musical biopics are a tough nut to crack. If you go the cradle-to-the-grave route, you risk sounding like a Wikipedia entry. But focusing on a particular period in an artist’s life (like John Lennon’s early years in Nowhere Boy, or Kurt Cobain’s last days in Last Days) can sometimes be more successful.
Bob Marley: One Love, starring Kingsley Ben-Adir and Lashana Lynch as Bob and Rita Marley, hedges its bets a bit. The spine of the film takes place over two years, beginning with the assassination attempt made against Bob in 1976, then moving to time spent recording and touring in Europe, and ending with a “One Love Peace Concert” back in Jamaica in 1978. (The movie would have you believe that this event solved all of that nation’s political problems through the power of song; in reality, the organizers of the show were both murdered within a couple of years after the concert.)
Sprinkled throughout these two key years—during which time he would expand his sound for the Exodus album, discover he had a rare form of cancer (and ignore his doctor’s medical advice), and have an argument with his wife—the film, coproduced by Marley’s family who worked with four credited screenwriters, flashes back to key moments in Marley’s life. While cracking the window like this does add resonance to some of the relationships, it also causes problems. Put bluntly: There’s a lot about Bob Marley that could have been included in One Love but was not.
Here are five tidbits that did not make the final cut.
“In a Government Yard in Trenchtown”
In one of Marley’s signature tunes, “No Woman, No Cry,” he sings to his wife, Rita, about the place where they grew up: Trenchtown, in Kingston, Jamaica. Another tune, “Trenchtown Rock,” is all about how Marley found inspiration and camaraderie growing up in the dirt-poor area.
The opening title cards of Bob Marley: One Love do contain a passing reference to Trenchtown—but it is surprising that the unique culture of this community, which was so important to Marley’s work, never gets a center stage moment in the film.
The area was originally owned by a wealthy Irishman named Daniel Trench, which is probably where it got its name—although, during its years of squalor, it also had several visible trenches. It’s now fair to call it the most important neighborhood in the development of Jamaican music. In addition to Bob Marley and the Wailers, several other groups, like Toots and the Maytals, Alton Ellis, the Abyssinians, and the Mighty Diamonds have their roots there.
Babylon, Delaware 19801
In one of the film’s flashbacks, young Bob tells young Rita that his mother has left Jamaica to live in America. But he says he won’t follow her. (Later, after the attempts on both of their lives, Bob suggests that Rita take the children to live with his mother for a little while, which she does.)
But in reality, Bob Marley did spend some time deep in, of all places, Wilmington, Delaware. (Indeed, one can now take kids to a playground in One Love Park.) Just how long he lived there is up for debate. But it is known that he worked for a spell at a Chrysler plant in Newark, Delaware, in the 1960s, and this is what inspired his song “Night Shift.” He also worked as a lab assistant at DuPont. His mother ran a Jamaican music store there called Roots.
“Peter and Bunny”
During the aforementioned fight-with-the-wife scene outside a swank party in Paris, Rita says that “this” is why “Peter and Bunny left.” (The “this” in question is, one surmises, Bob’s controlling demeanor, but it’s a little unclear; the screenwriters and the guiding hand of the Marley estate did not turn in the world’s sharpest script.)
Peter and Bunny are Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, who were key collaborators of Marley’s before their breakup in 1974. Both had important careers of their own: Tosh’s Legalize It and Equal Rights albums are as essential to a robust record collection as Bob’s stuff, and the Wailers were still called the Wailers long after Bunny Wailer left.
