Allow me a few of your precious moments to talk about a movie I never wanted to see.

What I mean by that is I never wanted to see it made because movie biographies are generally awful. And who wants to see an awful movie about someone who was very important to them?

Bob Marley was hugely influential in my life. He changed my life, and that’s not just bloggy hype tripe. He changed the very direction of my life. He also taught me about realistic revolution. About personal revolution.

When I was young and bendy—in body and spirit—Rasta philosophy had a huge impact on me. Eventually, I found myself working and living with Rastas, and like anything you immerse yourself in, it can tend to become central to how you see yourself in the world.

I no longer live by or strive to live by Rasta philosophy; I can’t cotton the misogyny and homophobia baked into most fundamentalist belief systems. And while Rasta isn’t a religion, it is a fundamentalist—and misogynistic and homophobic—belief system. Or way of life, as they’d prefer you to refer to it. And while a few Rasta friends from the olden days are still friendly to me despite my being trans, I know that they are also likely conflicted. Rasta beliefs, in the large sense, don’t hold space for people like me.

But that’s now. In the days I was involved in Rastafari, the hazy dreamscape of the pre-internet world, you could still be involved in fringe activities, hold fringe beliefs. And as much as we always claimed “Rastafari is the future,” it was and still is a fringe belief system.

The music, on the other hand…well, the internet has loosed the seventh seal of John’s book of Revelation and unleashed forces that can’t be stopped. Some forms or styles of music used to be an intensely personal experience for relatively small groups of people, but the internet has exposed them to everyone everywhere, all at once. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it means that a lot of people casually consume things that hold deep meaning to others.

That’s a lot of blathering without any movie talk, but I want to establish the place Bob held (and still holds to some extent) in my psyche, which should help explain why I thought a film biography about Bob Marley was likely to be the most disappointing 107 minutes of my life.

Only it wasn’t.

All biographical movies fall far short of the truth, and Bob Marley: One Love is no different. The filmmakers play fast and loose with the timeline of Bob’s life and many of the events and, you know, how music works. But what struck me is how much they got right. My fear of the casual consumption of someone who holds deep meaning to me was unfounded.

I watched the movie twice because I wanted to see it without judging its historical accuracy (as I admittedly did the first time I watched it). I wanted to experience it unburdened by expectation. The acting was fine, the wigs were fine, and the singing—when it wasn’t Bob’s voice dubbed in—was fine.

All the trappings were fine, and the story was fine. Ultimately, I don’t think the particular story they told about a couple of years of Bob’s life was the point of the movie. It certainly wasn’t what I liked about it.

So what made it more than fine? What was good about it?

The vibe, for lack of a more academic film school description.

The vibe.

It was Rastafari top to bottom. The film is steeped in ganja and Rasta, and that took me by surprise. I expected to see a defanged Bob Marley (like the one the Marley family presents to the world: the smiling “One Love” Bob while they try to sweep the “Burnin’ and Lootin'” revolutionary Bob under the expensive imported rugs).

But I really felt the presence of Rastafari and the profound, understated moments—the literally world-changing moments—of Bob’s acceptance or realization of Rasta. In that way, in presenting Rastafari to a lot of people who know it only as a catchphrase, I think the film is wildly successful.

It doesn’t matter that I don’t find meaning or solace in Rastafari anymore. I still think there’s value in someone else who only knows the smiling t-shirt Bob, seeing how central Rasta was to Bob’s life. It gives the music another facet, and it provides additional meaning to something that may have been previously seen as just entertainment.

Because Bob Marley’s music is important. It’s not objectively more important than a lot of 1970s golden age reggae, but it’s subjectively much more important because Bob achieved a reach that few 20th-century musicians could imagine. Bob Marley’s name and music are known by multitudes of people in places where mention of The Beatles or Bob Dylan would draw only blank stares.

Bob was, and may still be, the most loved and revered black man the world has ever known. I’ll include Martin Luther King in that assessment because outside of “the West,” King’s impact or influence isn’t as evident or strongly felt. Muhammed Ali had worldwide notoriety, but I think Bob’s reach and influence surpassed Ali’s, and I dare say it will endure longer.

The odds of Bob becoming who he became are so huge they’re incalculable. The movie doesn’t get into that because it isn’t about his life as a boy. But just know that for a time, Bob slept under Bunny Wailer’s family’s house in Kingston. There was nowhere else for him to stay. So he came from that. Sleeping in the dirt. And became one of the most famous and revered people in the world.

And to think that a “dirty Rasta”—as one cop in the film calls him—could rise to such heights! It’s an unbelievable story, and you can get a taste of the real story in Kevin Macdonald’s documentary film Bob Marley.

Bob Marley: One Love isn’t a documentary, but it’s a nice ride. Take it. You won’t be disappointed. I know it came out six months ago, but here we are now. Isn’t life beautiful?

WRITTEN BY A HUMAN