Do we really need another documentary on Bob Marley? If we do, this is probably the best one weâre gonna get. Marley is nearly two and a half hours long, and itâs directed by Kevin Macdonald (Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland), and itâs coming out on 4/20, which is either synchronicity or good marketing, depending on your point of view. (Itâs also simultaneously premiering online via Facebook, in case youâre way too high to leave the house.)
Iâm no Bob Marley expert, but I am familiar with a lot of his work, both on purposeâthose early sides with Lee âScratchâ Perry and the first couple of Wailers albums on Island Records are pretty greatâand just by being a white person who went to college in America. The reappropriation of Marleyâs political rhetoric as good-time party jams by the backward-hatted frat-masses is the subject of its own lengthy examination, but you wonât find it in Macdonaldâs Marley, which is reverential and austere.
We get interviews with family members and those who surrounded Marley during his brief life, and a few points are worth driving home: Bob Marley was half white, and during his youth felt ostracized in Jamaica; he visited America early on and realized he didnât fit in there, either; he really was as committed to social equality and freedom as he seemed; he really did smoke a shit-ton of weed. There are some fascinating passages about a couple concerts, one in Zimbabwe and one in Jamaica, that were surrounded by political unrest; Marleyâs efforts to keep the crowds from erupting into riots are remarkable. But thereâs not enough about the music or the man. In Macdonaldâs hands, Marley remains an enigma, a silk-screened face on a stinky T-shirt. 
