Sadly, this is one of those films that shoves almost all of it's best bits into the trails. What's left is a curiously sterile representation of the life of this vibrant and visionary man. To be fair, Kingsley Ben-Amir does turn in quite a charismatic performance, but the rest of that characters are largely under-cooked and seem there to make up the numbers. We get little by way of establishment. Why is he revered on his home island of Jamaica at the start? We are plonked into the centre of a political hotbed and then all to briefly, bullets are flying and we are in London, his family in Delaware. Again, little meat on the bones of context there for us to understand just what was going on and why he was so important to both sides in that conflict - alive or dead. The last twenty minutes does allow for more of his musical talents to shine, and KBA delivers them enthusiastically and engagingly, but somehow I just felt this was the thinnest of coats about his enigma. James Norton just looked like he was along because he liked the music and Lashana Lynch is totally unremarkable too. Son Ziggy may well have had a hand in this, but it really under-delivers on a story that I thought should have been a no-brainer politically, musically and culturally. Sorry, this is just a rather disappointing chronology that skirts across his life like a stylus on well worn vinyl. Pity.
