Kingsley Ben-Adir as Bob Marley [Chiabella James/Paramount]

BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE
Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green
Certificate: 15
☆☆☆☆

BIO pics about household names are hard to pull off. Michael Sheen told the New Journal the trick to playing Brian Clough or Tony Blair was to get the hair right. The rest followed.

Former William Ellis pupil and Kentish Towner born and bred Kingsley Ben-Adir has an unenviable job of slipping into Bob Marley’s frame.

The NW5 boy does it with relish. Marley’s persona is so widely known and been picked apart that interpreting him isn’t the easiest thing to do. That Kingsley is credible is a massive relief.

Director Green gives us a dramatic opening of the attempted assassination of Marley at his Hope Road home, in the build up to the Smile Jamaica concert: he then uses flashbacks to give a sense of Marley’s background, but this film is mainly about the making of Exodus and Marley’s final years.

Fleeing to a cold late 1970s London, we are shown the Wailers playing football in the park, there is a re-imagining of his gig at the Rainbow in Seven Sisters Road, and a scene in which Bob and the Wailers check out Joe Strummer giving it some on stage.

We get an abridged and sanitised version of the impact he had, and why. Rita (Lashana Lynch) is admirable and we are party to the tensions in their relationship.

Because the Marley family have produced the film, we get a stomping soundtrack – but it also avoids any controversy over his final years, when life-saving treatments such as removing his infected big toe were not acted on, to the world’s great loss.

For an insight into Marley’s life, politics and music, you can’t go wrong watching Dartmouth Park resident director Kevin MacDonald’s comprehensive documentary Marley.

And as the film focuses on the period when he wrote the album Exodus, those interested should pick up a book by Vivien Goldman. The Willesden Green music professor hung out while they made the album and her take feels as close as sitting at the mixing desk yourself.