Bob Marley has been dead now for longer than he was alive, but for some of us he was one of the people who shaped our youth. After “fake news” spread in 1975 of the death of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, he sang Jah Live; for many of us, Bob live. if not literally.

So don’t go to see Bob Marley: One Love if he’s one of your heroes and you’re expecting an accurate account of his short but eventful life.

This movie is an authorised version which includes production credits for numerous members of the Marley clan. Ostensibly directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, it seems rather to have been directed by the Marleys, possibly too many of them – or else by no one at all.

Any biopic has to select symbolic moments, if it’s not to run for hours. This film veers between cramming in repeated flashbacks to a few episodes in Marley’s life and lingering shots of him staring thoughtfully into space.

The years of poverty in Trenchtown that followed the split between Marley’s English soldier father and teenage mother are omitted in favour of numerous images of young Bob and his mother on the bus to Kingston. The film squeezes in nanoseconds of contemporary Jamaican political history, which is crucial because it makes much of the One Love concert at which Marley got rival party leaders Michael Manley and Edward Seaga to clasp hands.

Remarkably, it manages to remove any suspense at all from the assassination attempt on Marley’s life. Blink and you might miss Cindy Breakspeare, mother of Damian – perhaps the most direct heir of his father’s talents – and Marley’s companion for several years.

[caption id="attachment_1069228" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Producer Ziggy Marley, left, and Kingsley Ben-Adir on the set of Bob Marley: One Love. - Photo courtesy Paramount Pictures[/caption]

So, ironically, unless you already know the story of Marley’s life, some of this film may make no sense to you; and if you are familiar with his biography, it still won’t make sense, because at many points it diverges from the facts.

Perhaps it should rather be considered the story of the making of the Exodus album, which in the film symbolises his recommitment to Rastafarianism after he was shot in Jamaica and went into temporary exile, and his reaching spiritual maturity.

Exodus was also the breakthrough album that made him a superstar globally and not just in the Caribbean (though No Woman No Cry, from Rastaman Vibration, prepared the way).

Those of us who first heard the Wailers perform music from Exodus were shocked by the change, expecting the earlier, raw, passionate music that sometimes urged revenge for centuries of oppression: Concrete Jungle, Burnin’ and Lootin’, Small Axe – not love songs, or the rock-influenced and “creeping” effect (a perfect description) that the film Marley says he wants on tracks like Natural Mystic.

In this sanitised (or warped) history, it’s Marley, and not Island Records’ Chris Blackwell, who decides the Wailers need a change of style to broaden their appeal. Marley is shown spontaneously