Why Do Critics Hate Musician Biopics Like ‘Bob Marley: One Love’?

It’s happening again: a cinematic biography of a popular musician has failed to impress movie critics, while audiences flock to the movie in delight. Bob Marley: One Love opened in theaters on Valentine’s Day and is quickly on its way to becoming the biggest box office hit of 2024 so far. (Dune Part II will likely displace it in a couple of weeks; even so, this is the first new hit at the U.S. box office in weeks.) Though the reviews are neither as poor overall or vitriolic specifically as they’ve been for certain other music biopics, hardly anyone is calling One Love an exception to the rule – and per a lot of movie critics, that rule is “don’t make a musician biopic unless you’re doing something truly inventive.” (There’s a second rule in there somewhere about the movie Walk Hard, which I’ll address shortly.) Even if there’s potential innovation in, say, making four overlapping Beatles biopics instead of one, plenty of people groan with trepidation.

Part of this is just the healthy, normal gap between what critics and general audiences tend to enjoy. It’s the critic’s job to convey their experience with a piece of art, and critics, by virtue of having absorbed more art than casual viewers, tend to have less patience with the kind of familiarity and formula that music biopics traffic in. But there’s also a sense that pop-music biopics have gone wrong, even as they’ve exploded in popularity.

2000s-era biopics that successfully gunned for Oscars, like Ray (2004) and Walk the Line (2005), helped revive and popularize this subgenre, but the real point of divergence seems to be 2018’s Bohemian Rhapsody. The Queen biopic was a massive hit and a major Oscar success story (Rami Malek won Best Actor for imitating Freddie Mercury, just as Jamie Foxx playing Ray Charles did years earlier) while deeply irritating a lot of critics with its filmmaking: Choppy (yet Oscar-winning!) editing, a sanitized portrait of Mercury’s sexuality, and treatment of the surviving members of Queen that feels like the product of their producing credits rather than a desire to tell the most interesting story possible about the band. (What everyone else in Queen can agree upon is this: None of the other guys in Queen did anything wrong! Very illuminating.)

Bohemian Rhapsody wasn’t the first musician biopic to feature any of these problems – you can watch the life drain out of 2015’s Straight Outta Compton as the movie goes from raw, immediate portrait of galvanizing rap group N.W.A. in its first half to baldly negotiated agreement between various legal entities in its second, complete with nonsensical Avengers-style teasing of surviving members’ future projects. Rhapsody was, however, the first one to make almost a billion dollars in spite, or possibly because, of those issues. As Rocketman, Elvis, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, and One Love followed, plenty of critics have grumbled that most of these movies amounted to laugh-free remakes of Walk Hard, the 2007 comedy that amalgamized Walk the Line and Ray to spoof the whole musician-biopic tradition. The Walk Hard complaint has become so pervasive that it’s moved beyond film critics and comedy cultists; a quick social-media search in the wake of the Beatles quadruple-biopic announcement found countless posts pointing out that Walk Hard deftly covered this stuff in the space of five minutes (it features a scene with Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Jason Schwartzman, and Justin Long as a bickering Fab Four).

we don’t need a beatles biopic when this scene from walk hard already exists
pic.twitter.com/RO3v42AenP https://t.co/RllpQ3N4Op

— ♡ kiran ♡ (@kiranverse) February 20, 2024

Walk Hard is a great comedy, and one of the only notable cinematic genre spoofs of the past 20 years. (If the movie makes its task look easy, look no further than the cutesy nonsense of that spoofy Weird Al biopic, a movie whose observations about the subgenre’s clichés amount to “we’ve heard they exist.”) However, the idea that a spoof movie – especially one that comparably few people saw – might reasonably end a type of movie with decades of history and popularity behind it is absurd. (No one gets fussed about the Scream series outlasting Scary Movie.) For that matter, most of the recent music biopics don’t much resemble Walk Hard – and the one that comes closest, Elvis, is also far and away the best of the lot. (Walk Hard itself borrowed plenty of Elvis lore and imagery back in 2007, so it’s natural that an Elvis movie would overlap with the spoof version.) The tedium of the others has little to do with the incisiveness of Walk Hard, no matter how much you love John C. Reilly.

Take One Love, for example: It’s not a comprehensive cradle-to-grave chronicle of Bob Marley. Excepting a handful of brief flashbacks, it’s primarily set over the course of a couple of years in the late 1970s, focusing on Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) recording the album Exodus in London and then touring the world, all in the aftermath of a violent attack on his family in Jamaica. It runs about 95 minutes without credits, and though there are some extremely cheesy Bob Marley: Origins-style scenes about the composing of some hit songs, it takes a more reflective approach to the career moves from this period, and doesn’t overload the story with exposition. On paper, then, this movie does at least some of what we want musician biopics to do. Yet despite the lack of resemblance to Walk Hard, the movie remains inert. As charismatic as Ben-Adir is, as momentarily lyrical as Reinaldo Marcus Green’s direction attempts to get, the movie’s conflicts all feel momentary and disconnected.

What One Love shares with other recent creative failures in this department is a sense that its creative control has been surrendered to a proxy for its subject (or, in the case of Rocketman’s still-living Elton John, to the subject himself). Multiple members of the Marley family depicted in the film are credited as producers here, and while bargaining with the real-life figures may be a part of securing life rights and music clearances, it sure doesn’t make for an interesting film. Most of these movies essentially offer an authorized biography, a promo piece going through the motions of cinema. It’s not so different from a concert movie, or a particularly pandering IP revival: This stuff is for the (casual) fans, a souvenir that pairs great with a Target t-shirt or a greatest-hits CD.

And the fans seem to respond. There are exceptions; I Wanna Dance with Somebody was a surprise flop in 2022, perhaps due to a combination of Whitney Houston’s inimitability and the lack of remove from the sadness of her final act. (Or maybe it was that movie’s particular ineptitude, which did go below and beyond the usual.) But generally speaking, audiences seem to enjoy the products of these negotiations, which evidently have enough realness – Bob Marley gets shot! Bob Marley glances in the direction of other women in a vague nod toward his extramarital affairs! – to give the impression of a well-rounded portrait. In theory, One Love is a cross between two of the best contemporary musician films: I’m Not There, the Todd Haynes Bob Dylan movie, and Love & Mercy, an unusually moving portrayal of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. It attempts to grapple with the artist’s larger role in the culture that created him, like the Dylan project, and covers the recording of a specific album, like the Wilson film. In practice, Green gestures around, indicating that he may have seen good musician biopics in the past, even if he’s not allowed to actually absorb their lessons. One Love has probably already been seen by more people than Love & Mercy and I’m Not There put together.

Does that justify the creative stasis of these movies? Not really, but it does explain them, and why they’re not going any way any time soon. Artists and their estates have seized on biopics as a potential revenue stream in an era where even some legacy acts have a hard time actually making money from streaming services like Spotify. No wonder a movie like One Love blandly plays the hits in ways that are superficially pleasing but ultimately disconnected from Marley’s artistry. It’s the Spotification of cinema.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.