Tag: Kingsley Ben-Adir

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Bob Marley: One Love

Kingsly Ben-Adir in Bob Marley: One Love.

Before embarking on a musical biopic project, all filmmakers should be required to watch two films: First, Walk The Line, the made-in-Memphis story of Johnny Cash’s romance with June Carter, which is probably the best musical biopic ever made; then Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which skewers musical biopics so expertly it almost killed the entire genre. 

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green has clearly studied Walk The Line for Bob Marley: One Love. It takes roughly the same approach to its subject, isolating one specific story line out of an artist’s rich and complex life story to illuminate the character behind the music. In this case, it’s the story of the recording of Exodus, Marley’s 1977 album which Time called the greatest musical achievement of the twentieth century. After a brief opening sequence where young Nesta Robert Marley (Nolan Collingnon) and his mother Cedilla (Nadine Marshall) move from the plantation to Kingston, we meet adult Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) as the already rich and famous king of reggae. Jamaica in the mid-’70s was riven by what amounted to a low-intensity civil war between supporters of democratic socialist Prime Minister Michael Manley and his reactionary rival Edward Seaga. As the violence intensified, Marley was asked to play the Smile Jamaica concert, which was intended to, if not unify the country, at least convince people to stop killing one other by bringing them together in a shared love of reggae. During the promotional press conference, Marley refused to take sides, instead declaring that all Earthly rulers are “Babylon”, and that true peace could only be achieved through Rastafarianism, the cannabis-infused Pan-Africanist cult descended from Judaism which reveres Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie as a liberationist messiah. 

His message does not go over well with the Powers That Be, and someone (probably Seaga, but maybe the CIA) ordered a hit on Marley. Two days before Smile Jamaica, as the band was rehearsing, gunmen infiltrated Marley’s family compound and shot Marley, his manager Don Taylor (Anthony Welsh), and wife Rita (Lashana Lynch). As his band fled the country, the wounded Marley promised to keep his commitment to his people and perform one song. When Marley took the stage in front of 80,000 people at Smile Jamaica, he showed the crowd his still-bloody gunshot wounds, and launched into “War,” whose lyrics Marley adapted from Haile Selassie’s 1963 speech to the United Nations. “Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned; that until there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation; that until the color of a man’s skin is of no more importance than the color of his eyes, and until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race; that until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion to be pursued, but never attained.” 

As you can see, Green and his three screenwriters have a much more complex job than, say, the makers of Bohemian Rhapsody. The Smile Jamaica sequence is more compelling than Queen at Live Aid, but you can be forgiven if you come out of One Love not knowing who was fighting whom, or why they wanted to kill a popular musician. The film’s fundamental flaw is that Bob Marley doesn’t deserve the Walk The Line treatment—he deserves Malcom X, a sweeping historical biography which connects all the dots. The filmmakers sense this, and try to cover some ground with flashbacks. Unfortunately, these flashbacks often come in exactly the way Walk Hard parodies, with the artist remembering his trauma as he walks onstage. 

But my job as is not to review the film that “should be,” but rather the one that exists. Yes, Bob Marley: One Love is a stodgy, conventional biopic, but at least it’s done well. Ben-Adir, one of the most talented actors of his generation, disappears into the role. He struggles mightily to rise above mere mimicry of Marley’s distinctive patois and reveal the legend’s inner life. When Ben-Adir and Lynch are together as Bob and Rita, the film crackles with life—only to lose the momentum with meandering scenes in London recording studios and swanky Paris parties. Green and Ben-Adir take pains to emphasizes their hero’s spirituality. A smoky Rastafarian ceremony makes clear that reggae is, like American soul, thinly secularized religious music. One Love sees Marley as a Rasta Apostle Paul, an evangelist who refined the message of a revolutionary cult into a universalist religion. 

For a glimpse into the fuller story, I recommend the 2012 documentary Marley. While Bob Marley: One Love is far from perfect, at least its heart is in the right place.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Greatest: Four Legends Gather in One Night in Miami

One of my all-time favorite plays is Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. The 1998 Tony Award winner tries to untangle the mysteries of a night in 1941 when German physicist Werner Heisenberg visited his mentor Niels Bohr at his home in the Danish capital. Bohr and Heisenberg had worked together to deduce the rules of quantum physics (known as the “Copenhagen model”), but now Heisenberg had a new boss, Adolf Hitler, who wanted an atomic bomb.

After a dinner prepared by Bohr’s wife, Margarethe, Bohr and Heisenberg went for a walk in the garden. But instead of wandering for hours, as they often did while working on difficult problems, they quickly returned to the house. Heisenberg thanked Margarethe and showed himself out.

Sam Cooke, Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, and Jim Brown walk into a hotel — (l-r) Leslie Odom Jr., Eli Goree, Kingsley Ben-Adir, and Aldis Hodge star in Regina King’s One Night in Miami.

Soon after, the Bohrs fled Nazi-occupied Denmark in the middle of the night. They made their way to America, where Niels Bohr worked on the Manhattan Project. Meanwhile, Heisenberg became the head of the Nazi bomb project, which never even came close to producing a working weapon. Neither man ever revealed what they talked about that night. Did Heisenberg try to recruit Bohr for the Nazi bomb project? Was he there to ask his old mentor to check his math? Or did he carry a warning to Bohr? The three people present went to their graves keeping the secret. Frayn’s play explores the possibilities, with the ghosts of the three people present reliving all the different interpretations of the events.

Kemp Powers’ 2013 play, One Night in Miami, tries something similar. On February 25, 1964, Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston to claim the heavyweight boxing title. In the crowd that night were Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown. After the fight, instead of hitting the legendary Miami party circuit, the soon-to-be Muhammad Ali retreated to Malcolm X’s hotel room, where they were later joined by Cooke and Brown. It was an unprecedented gathering of Black talent, and the weightiness of the evening was not apparent at the time. No one knows what they really talked about, but Powers’ script imagines an evening that is equal parts celebratory and foreboding.

Actress Regina King chose to adapt One Night in Miami for her directorial debut after winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for 2018’s If Beale Street Could Talk. King’s first task was casting four of the most recognizable people in 20th-century history. It’s hard to say who had the hardest job. Kingsley Ben-Adir, who recently played Barack Obama in The Comey Rule, portrays Malcolm X — which means he’s in the shadow of Denzel Washington’s astounding performance in Spike Lee’s biopic. Ballers‘ Eli Goree is Ali, a role that even the likes of Will Smith couldn’t pull off convincingly. Aldis Hodge, MC Ren from Straight Outta Compton, plays Jim Brown, a man considered by some to be the greatest player in NFL history and who went on to a 50-year career in film and television. As Sam Cooke, Leslie Odom Jr. at least has the advantage of a great singing voice, since he originated the role of Aaron Burr in Hamilton on Broadway.

Crafting these performances to perfection is clearly where King’s head is at — and rightly so. All four of her leads turn out to be stellar. Goree’s Ali is, improbably, the best of the bunch. He can both deliver the legendary bombast and reveal a thoughtful vulnerability in private. Ben-Adir’s Malcolm X is on the receiving end of most of that vulnerability. In Powers’ script, Malcolm X is the most morally ambivalent character, who intends to use the publicity surrounding his friend’s historic championship to launch his schism with the Nation of Islam. But it is Malcolm who convinces Sam Cooke to stop devoting his talent to sappy love songs and push socially conscious works like “A Change is Gonna Come.”

One Night in Miami lacks Copenhagen‘s experimental streak, but it functions beautifully as a four-handed character sketch of some of the most important Black men of the 20th century. (It’s undoubtedly more entertaining — when I saw Copenhagen performed live, half the audience left during intermission.) King’s cameras pace restlessly around the room, finding framing that keeps all four actors in view, as they would appear onstage. This is a film that carefully doles out close-ups, and more directors should heed King’s example. The film loses momentum when the group breaks up, and each character gets a little exposition designed to educate the audience on their historical importance. But when the four legends are together in the same room, One Night in Miami crackles with the fire of life.

One Night in Miami

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High Fidelity: Indie Rock Classic Gains New Life on the Small Screen

Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel High Fidelity is a story of obsession turned toxic. But it’s not just Rob Fleming’s obsession with discovering why all of his relationships have failed that’s toxic, it’s his relationship with music that’s unhealthy, too. Rob is the 30-something owner of Championship Vinyl, a record store in London, who famously asked, “Do I listen to sad music because I’m miserable or am I miserable because I listen to sad music?” Why not both?

The novel, which was a huge bestseller in England, is something of a founding document of the 1990s-2000s indie rock movement. Rob and his record store cohorts Dick and Berry are the quintessential Record Store Guys. They’ve weaponized their passions and aren’t afraid to tell you about it. The Top Five lists they competitively compile are a) a jumping off point for people looking to expand their musical tastes and b) a way to push away and put down the unhip.

Zoë Kravitz (left) and David H. Holmes in Championship Vinyl

High Fidelity got a classic movie adaptation by director Stephen Frears in 2000 starring John Cusack, in one of his best roles, as Rob. Jack Black, in his original breakout role, was Barry, the hyperactive music enthusiast who starts his own band (the exquisitely named Sonic Death Monkeys) and moves from professional consumer to semi-pro producer. Rob eventually follows a similar arc, starting a record label of his own to help break a promising young band. But Rob’s story is complicated by his on-again, off-again relationship with Laura, his more responsible better half. Yes, Rob grows, but like Prince in Purple Rain, he advances from “self-absorbed jerk” to “slightly less self-absorbed jerk.”

I’ll have to admit, when I heard that Hulu had adapted High Fidelity into a gender-swapped limited series, I thought, this is either going to kill or crash. First of all, record store (or should I say, music snob) culture ain’t what it used to be. Building the perfect mixtape from your hoard of vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CDs, which so obsessed Rob, has been replaced by assembling the perfect playlist in your streaming music service. Second, I always thought of Rob’s almost pathological fear of commitment as a particularly male trait. I’m certainly not reflexively against gender-swapped remakes (that wasn’t the 2016 Ghostbusters‘ biggest problem), but I wasn’t sure how this one was going to work.

The best decision the producers of the new High Fidelity made was casting Zoë Kravitz as Rob (short for Robyn). Kravitz, whose mother Lisa Bonet was one of John Cusack’s failed relationships in the 2000 film, manages to sell the parts of Rob’s personality that wouldn’t necessarily hold together on the page. She sometimes seems to be asking herself, “How would Natasha Lyonne play this scene?” (Lyonne actually directs episode 6, “Weird But Warm.”) Kravitz is, in real life, exceptionally beautiful. To play the unlucky-in-love Rob, she doesn’t ugly it up in the conventional way. Instead, she signals her lack of confidence with slouchy body language, and her over-it-all hipness with dismissing puffs of cigarette smoke.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Holmes, Kravitz

The supporting cast is vital for this story, and here too, the series delivers. David H. Holmes as Simon replaces the film’s Todd Louisio as Dick, the most mild-mannered member of the Championship Vinyl team. Simon is the character who benefits the most from the expanded format. The story of how he moves on from being one of Rob’s unfortunate boyfriends to coming to terms with his homosexuality is believable, funny, and a little poignant. Of course, since he’s an employee of Championship Vinyl, his first relationship with a guy is a slow-rolling catastrophe.

The Jack Black slot is taken by Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who was so good as Lady Reed in Craig Brewer’s Dolemite Is My Name. Randolph plays Cherise, a person who, like Black, uses their bluster and cutting humor as both a shield and a bludgeon. This version of High Fidelity underutilizes both the character and Randolph’s charisma, but there are hints that she would play a bigger part if there’s a second season.

Stretching the story out has the paradoxical effect of minimizing the novel’s major storyline: Rob’s exceedingly ill-advised quest to track down all five of her major exes and ask them what went wrong. Instead, there’s much greater emphasis on Rob’s near-miss relationship with Mac (the regal-looking Kingsley Ben-Adir) and her dalliance with the normie Clyde (Jake Lacy), which blossoms despite her best efforts to self-sabotage. High Fidelity doesn’t just survive the transition from indie snobbery to poptimism, it unexpectedly thrives.

High Fidelity: Indie Rock Classic Gains New Life on the Small Screen