Marley

Marley (2012) is a feature-length documentary you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Kevin Macdonald — the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind The Last King of Scotland. At 144 minutes, it traces Bob Marley's life from a poor childhood in Nine Mile, Jamaica, through his years recording with Island Records and Chris Blackwell, to his death from cancer in May 1981 at the age of thirty-six.

The film draws on interviews with Rita Marley, Ziggy Marley, Cedella Marley, Bunny Wailer and Jimmy Cliff, alongside rare concert footage and home recordings that most Marley documentaries never had access to. The 1976 assassination attempt before the Smile Jamaica concert gets its own chapter. So does the question of his mixed-race identity and how it shaped his outsider status on the island before he became its greatest export.

Macdonald doesn't flatten Marley into a saint. The complicated personal life is part of the record, and the film is better for including it. What you end up with is not just a music biography but a study of how one person's sound — recorded mostly in the 1970s — built a mythology that outlasted him by decades. Stream Marley (2012) online on iFILM.