Movie Nation

In the mood for a “Shaolin Soccer/Kung Fu Hustle” martial arts comedy, a Soviet era period piece reminding the world of the Bad Old Days when Russia was even more repressive than it is today?

Well, so was I. But “The Invisible Fight (Nähtamatu võitlus)” doesn’t really sate one’s “Hi-Yah” craving.

It’s a ponderous Estonian farce that takes swipes at Mother Russia, the early ’70s Soviet cars, fashions, politics and foreign policy. And those riffs are built around a wild-eyed Estonian survivor of a kung fu massacre on the Chinese border, a long-haired punk who comes home mad for kung fu and the music of Black Sabbath.

Can this comedy be saved? Not if it’s got one third the jokes of “Shaolin Soccer” spread out over a narrative nearly 30 minutes longer than that cult classic.

But there are enough funny elements in writer-director Rainer Sarnet’s (“November”) latest that it’s a pity he didn’t bring in an Estonian, Latvian or Finnish script doctor to joke this up and nag him into abandoning the many dead spaces between the laughs. Financiers from those three Baltic countries produced the picture., and they’d have been well-served badgering him over final cut.

The film opens on the tense 1973 border between the People’s Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Rafael (Ursel Tilk) is one of the Estonian “republic’s” contributions to this guard force, and the witness and sole survivor of an attack by wild-haired/boom-box wielding Chinese martial artists (Eddie Tsai, Johnny X. Wang and Kyle Wavebourne).

This trio of nascent metalheads leap walls, dance on the barrels of raised AK-47s and fend off bullets from those semi-automatic weapons with those flimsy, floppy swords common in Bruce Lee-era martial arts movies.

The wirework fights are as amusing as they are impressive. The swishing missed-blows and punches landing sound effects and quick-zoom close-ups of the leering masters of their craft adorably mimic the style of such movies back in the day.

Rafael is told “God saved you” for a higher calling. And when he comes home, long-haired and kung-fu and Black Sabbath-obsessed, life is nothing but frustration.

“Everything cool is banned in Soviet Union,” he bitches, in Estoninan with English subtitles.

But then he stumbles into some Eastern Orthodox monks who are anything but passive preachers of The Word. They take their martial arts seriously, so seriously that one and all bark at Mister “Tiger Style, Eagle Claw” and clucking “Chicken” style and his weak kung fu.

“Go home, you clown!”

But he doesn’t. And under the tutelage of Irinei (Kaarel Pogg) and Nafanail (Indrek Sammul), the metalhead monk just might learn humility, kung fu and how to Get the Girl (Ester Kuntu) whose fiance beat Rafeal to a pulp before the kid’s kung fu/kingdom of heaven conversion.

The action comedy bits here work, no matter how far-fetched the reasons for the fight. The objects of fun — Soviet repression, Soviet cars (a ZAZ, Zaporozhets is a supporting character), Eastern Orthodox icon-worship and monastic rites — are ripe for mockery.

But the middle acts of this, with Rafael studying (boring training and indoctrination sequences) and the rituals and sects within the monastery explained, are tedium itself.

Tilk is properly gonzo in the lead role. But too much of what surrounds him is static, dull and listless. A vigorous edit might have helped. A bit of joking up the screenplay before rolling camera would have helped more.

And everybody knows Blue Öyster Cult was always cooler than any band Ozzy Osbourne fronted.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Ursel Tilk, Ester Kuntu, Kaarel Pogga and Indrek Sammul, with Eddie Tsai

Credit: Scripted and directed by Rainer Sarnet. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:55

Kaiju away,  Lizard King and Ape Emperor.

Normal sized Rebecca Hall and Dan Bennett also star.

Mar. 29.

“Players” is a pre-#MeToo rom-com sitcom masquerading as a feature length comedy.

It’s a leering, light but never funny and rarely charming throwback about a group of friends who run “plays” to help each other score one-night stands. They get away with it by paying lip-service to a “switch hitter” (bisexual) in the ranks and telling a story about trying to “convert a one night stand into a romance.”

So yes, it covers a lot of sexual bases. And yes, it’s unamusingly dated as the profession of most of this “play” running quartet — a New York newspaper.

Gina Rodriguez is Mackenzie, aka “Mack,” 33 and one of the boys when it comes to hit-it-and-quit-it-and-brag-about-it one night stands.

Mack and Brannagan (Augustus Prew), Brannagan’s brother “Little” (Joel Courtney) and newspaper “visuals” designer Adam (Damon Wayans Jr.) are supposed to be college chums who have been inventing and “running plays” like “Chemical Spill,” “Betsy Ross’s Mother” and “Drip Drop” for twelve years.

First comes the targeting, then comes the analysis (“tourist,” etc.) and then the play-call.

After it’s over, it’s time to break it all down for the others.

“He’s not a groomer, so I got lost a bit in the woods.”

Mack and her team run their best game at the hot freelance Brit journalist Nick (Tom Ellis) is serious and self-serious and “I might ‘like’ him.”

“I’m 33 and I’m exhausted. I want an adult…a grown-ass man.”

Can they come up with the plays that will a playbook Nick into a “boyfriend” “landing.”

“What constitutes ‘landing?'”

“I want a DRAWER.” In his tony apartment, amidst all the trophies, combat zone mementos and such.

That baseline description pretty much gives away this limp “How I Finally made Friends with Your Mother” movie. Rodriguez, director Trish Sie and screenwriter Whit Anderson lack the nerve to make this truly raunchy and carnal. And the film wins few points for creating rituals, inside jokes and cameraderie amongst our quartet but can’t make much of a challenge out of who in the group — joined by office manager Ashley (Liza Koshy), an enthusiastic natural at these play-acting “games” — secretly crushes on Mack the “G.O.A.T.”

“Jane the Virgin” alumna Rodriguez has the timing and bubbly energy to make her character tolerable in a slick movie that’s unoriginal, trite and cliched. She gives it her all, but this was never more than a feeble excuse for a Valentine’s Day romantic comedy.

Rating: TV-MA, sex (not explicit), profanity, alcohol

Cast: Gina Rodriguez, Damon Wayans Jr., Tom Ellis, Augustus Prew, Joel Courtney, Ego Nwodim and Lia Koshy

Credits: Directed by Trish Sie, scripted by Whit Anderson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

The quiet inscrutability of the movies of Flemish filmmaker Bas Devos can be gleaned from their reviews, filled with vague appreciations and words like “unassuming” and “placidity.”

Which is the viewer’s clue that the drama depicted is subtle in the extreme in festival darlings such as “Violet,” “”Ghost Tropic” and “Hellhole.”

The one funny thing that stands out about “Here,” his latest, is that one film festival nominated it for “best documentary.” It isn’t a documentary. It has actors playing characters, a hint of a love story, and a lot of Belgian urban and suburban scenery. But one can understand the confusion. Nobody — critics, festival curators or festival-goers, wants to give away that maybe they don’t “get it.”

“Here” is something of a reverie, with a cosmopolitan context. The Brussels and environs settings are seen as a gathering place for transplants — immigrants. A simple bus ride has the look of committee meeting at the U.N.

And that ties into the film’s organizing metaphor — moss. A Chinese immigrant, ShuXiu (Liyo Gong), studies the tiny plant and its reactions to a changing environment. There is “a whole forest of life” in every accumulated clump, she tells Romanian construction worker Stefan (Stefan Gota).

It is a simple life form, the first plant to establish itself on land, and it thrives seemingly wherever it finds itself. ShuXiu plucks a clump from between cracks in a city sidewalk.

That’s an immigration metaphor writ large, or what passes for one in the “passivity” of Bas Devos.

Stefan hangs with his co-workers, meets up with friends, all of whom are immigrants, some of whom are doing favors for him — fixing his worn out car, for instance. He makes them soup from his homeland.

And now there’s a work break and he’s got on his shorts in preparation for “going home,” where his mother awaits and she hopes he will visit a friend there who has somehow wound up in prison.

Stefan’s wandering has only the vaguest of aims. How and when is he leaving? He’s emptying his fridge in preparation. Will he be coming back?

“This is home,” he says to no one but himself as he takes in one urban construction site view.

He meets with his sister (Alina Constantin), a long-settled immigrant nurse. And then he gets caught in the rain and ducks into a Chinese restaurant. ShuXiu is behind the counter, friendly and outgoing. He has no clue that she’s merely helping her “auntie,” who runs “La Longue Marche,” a landmark event in the history of communist China and a curious name for an eatery.

Stumbling into her on a forest shortcut he sometimes takes, Stefan learns of her true profession and passion for it. Maybe he should postpone his trip and, you know, make her some soup.

“Here,” which has little dialogue (in French, Flemish, Chinese and Romanian), isn’t a tale with action or many of what you’d call basic dramatic devices. It meanders, broods, and takes a shot at entrancing us with its vibe and passivity. Nothing much happens because no one is driven to make much happen.

Yes, it’s rather dull, with little here that could be confused for “entertaining,” and pardonnez moi for suggesting that “The Emperor has no clothes.”

But it’s interesting enough as it invites the viewer into interpretations, messages it might be sending and observations Devos is making about our changing world and those best adapted to roll with those changes, taking comfort and pleasure wherever they settle and accumulate. Like moss.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Stefan Gota, Liyo Gong, Teodor Corban and Alina Constantin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bas Devos. A Rediance release.

Running time: 1:22

Ten years after Harmony Korine gave us the downside of becoming “Spring Breakers,” a UK writer-director has given us the subtitled British version.

Writer-director Molly Manning Walker’s “How to Have Sex” follows three hedonistic teens on their quest for the perfect sex, sun and soaking-in-booze holiday, as they await their higher education fate in the form of final grades from high school.

It’s a rowdy, rambunctious bawdy girls abroad dramedy with a lot less edge and a lot more sentimentality than Korine’s corrosive take on that sort of cultural rite of passage.

Em (Enva Lewis) is tall, Black and gay, and obsessing over whether she “gets in” to a college that can take her somewhere in life. Skye (Lara Peake) is a smart young woman of experience, not sweating the college qualifying exams thing for the length of this planned bacchanale.

But “Sex” principally follows the shortest, Tara or “Taz” (Mia McKenna-Bruce), a Britneyish virgin who is most unsure of her future — even the losing-her-virginity business — as she struggles with social expectations, peer pressure and bad decisions that come right up to that line in the sand called “consent.”

When the girls go “Wooo-hoooo,” Taz “Woooo-hoos” the loudest. When the bottles open, she’s hitting them the hardest. And while all three are speaking of sex in score-keeping terms, Tara’s the most mission-oriented.

“I can’t die a virgin!”

When some “fit” lads from another part of the UK turn out to be in the “Romeo, Romeo” balcony suite next door, we and the girls — especially Taz — are allowed to think “How convenient.” Heck, one roomie in that next-door suite is a lesbian (Laura Ambler) who is A) just one of the lads and B) coincidentally convenient for our Em.

But it is Tara’s journey that this film focuses on, the attentions of the simple, tattooed and good-hearted “bro” Badger (Shaun Thomas) and his just as “fit” mate Paddy (Samuel Bottomly). Who will Tara choose? Will it be a wise choice? And just how certain can one be of a “choice” when someone is this young and there’s this much peer pressure and alcohol involved?

The subtlety and general lack of melodrama — save for the coincidences — is what’s winning in this film, which takes a few predictable turns before reaching a generally unsurprising conclusion. It’s well-acted, well-shot and edited in ways that play up the seeming spontaniety and improvisational skills of the cast.

Much of the movie is a series of montages, a whirl of insistent DJ’s egging on young people descending on Malia, Crete for binge drinking, promiscuity and “pressure” to just go along with the crowd. Historically, other films covered much the same ground, and “Spring Breakers” had a more stylized approach to this peer-pressure to cross lines “MTV’s Spring Break” value system.

The opposite-of-posh accents of one-and-all are so thick the U.S. version of “Sex” has subtitle. Memo to “Bob Marley” movie-makers. What were YOU thinking?

When “How to Have Sex” picked up “unexpected” BAFTA (British Oscar) nominations, one could easily guess that perhaps the acclaim attached to a fairly routine coming-of-age drama covering conventionally discomfiting ground was due to the filmmakers’ own story and how it ties into the serious messaging of the not wholly humorless movie.

But the players put this over, especially McKenna-Bruce (of the recent Netflix “Persuasion”), who captures the tough face girls reach for when covering for their vulnerability. One and all give us their take on the hedonism of youth, the limits of “best friends forever,” the way women eye another woman’s “man” and how guys live by similar rationalizations as they stab their mates in the back and treat women like carnival prizes to be acquired and discarded.

And writer-director Walker makes valid points about how youth culture is exploited and sexualized into a self-perpetuating monster where “the norm” is what’s been created to sell vacations, alcohol and “bad decisions” to generations, all in the name of an ever- bending and more fraught coming-of-age for generations of girls.

Rating:unrated, sex, teen binge drinking, smoking, profanity

Cast: Mia McKenna-Bruce, Enva Lewis, Shaun Thomas, Lara Peake, Laura Ambler and Samuel Bottomley

Credits: Scripted and directed by Molly Manning Walker. A Mubi release.

Running time:

Dakota Johnson is so miscast, so “off” in the title role of Sony/Marvel’s latest superhero movie that even her side-eyes seems affected, studied and practiced in front of the mirror before anybody yelled “Action!”

But co-star Tahir Rahim is so awful, cast as the villain, that one sits in slack-jawed awe at the number of times the production plainly and clumsily had him re-dub his lifeless line-readings.

From the looks of things, it’s a wonder anyone even bothered. “Madame Web” is joyless, a “Jonah Hex/Morbius” level disaster of a comic book movie.

Sony’s umpeenth trip into arachnophilia isn’t about multiverserses or living up to your responsibilities because Uncle Ben would have wanted you to or Mary Jane would expect nothing less. It’s about seeing the future as time stops long enough for our titular heroine to do that.

For the viewer, time stops a couple of minutes into “Madame Web” and doesn’t restart until we’ve stepped outside of the cinema in dumbfounded shock over the s–tstorm TV director S.J. Clarkson (“Jessica Jones”) presided over, that the admittedly-limited Johnson let herself be talked into and that content-starved theaters desperately need to be a hit.

One doesn’t wonder so much at where the time spent watching this went as ponder if one’s cell phone has any charge left as we’ve switched it on so many times to see if indeed time has stopped.

This film is a fiasco, pretty much from the start. A laughably derivative origin story takes us to spider-bite-central, the Amazon of 1973 and then Queens of 2003 where the daughter of a pregnant arachnologist bitten by a spider 30 years before discovers her “super” powers.

She can see into the future.

Johnson plays paramedic turned superheroine Cassie with as much swagger and attitude as we’ve come to expect from the clothed portion of her career.

Sydney Sweeney, still taking calls from her business manager about the cash cow that was “Anyone But You,” former “Dora the Explorer” Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor of “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” are three young women targeted by spider-obsessed villain Ezekial Sims (Rahim).

A near-death experience gave Cassie this foresight, and she saves the three teen strangers from their fate. And then she saves them again. And again.

She wasn’t able to prevent her boss (Mike Epps) from driving his ambulance into an accident, but once Cassie figures out she can change history/fate, she sets out to do just that.

The tedious tale told here is about Cassie’s learning curve, how she comes to understand her powers and use them to compensate for the fact that she’s not super strong, spidery or given a form-fitting body suit.

“Did I die?” Johnson’s Cassie asks her paramedic partner Ben (Adam Scott) will all the emotion she can summon. Which isn’t much, and never has been, to be honest.

Sweeney is given a short skirt and big glasses and even less to play than her swimsuited turn in “Anyone But You” demanded, and further underwhelms.

The dialogue is dusty, inane and laughless. The period piece setting may have some further purpose than showcasing the mostly ’80s vintage cars, the still-standing Blockbuster video stores and an attempted table dance to Britney’s “new” hit, “Toxic,” but damned if I can see one.

Still, in the interest of bucking up the theaters, which are playing to empty houses these days, just let me suggest that if you’re still into superhero movies, go see it and tell me I’m wrong.

A flatlining genre just lost its cardiac paddles over this one.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Mike Epps, Tahir Rahim, Adam Scott and Emma Roberts.

Credits: Directed by S.J. Clarkson, scripted by Matt Sazam, Burk Sharpless and Claire Parker, based on the Marvel comic book character. A Sony/Marvel release.

Running time: 1:57

“Upgraded” is an almost-frothy rom-com built on a “Devil Wears Prada” framework.

A plucky intern at an auction house deals with a tyrannical boss and a new love on a trip to London where she tries to make it in a pretentious world of prestige art sales.

It’s a star vehicle for Miss “Plucky,” played by Camila Mendes (“Riverdale”). So of course Oscar winner Marisa Tomei and Oscar nominee Lena Olin steal it from her.

Fun turns by Anythony Head as a tipsy British painter and Andrew Schultz as a grumpy/mouthy New York brother-in-law and some properly bitchy “mean girl” colleagues (Fola Evans-Akingbola and Rachel Matthews) and snappy banter are among its recommendations.

“Thank you for doing the bare minumum that this job requires.” “A degree in art history is actually very useful!”

“What happened to your manners, ‘Downton Abbey?'” “More of a ‘Bridgerton’ man, myself.”

Ana (Mendes) is a Tampa native struggling to get through an internship with a top art auction house in New York when luck and initiative earn her a big break — a London trip and chance to be “third assistant” to the “sociopathic perfectionist” Claire (Tomei), who slings a Euro-bourgeois accent even though, rumor has it, she’s “from Minnetonka, Minnesota.”

Events conspire to earn lowly Ana an “upgrade” to first class, and that’s how she bumps into (literally) posh Will (Archie Renaux of “The Other Zoey” and “Best Beer Run Ever”).

That’s how she meets his “rapidly aging” model/actress mom (Olin), falls in with artist Julius (Head) and generally entangles herself in a big “hush hush” auction of modernist masterworks.

The character’s struggles are mild, with little if any of that “Prada” edge. Mendes is a pleasant and pretty leading lady who looks ten years younger than she is, with just enough chemistry with Renaux to achieve “bare minimum the job requires” status.

And while actress turned director Carlson Young keeps the trains and planes running (slowly) on time, she doesn’t give us a single scene that pops, or production design that ever comes across as upscale, only little flashes of wit and fun from the veterans in the cast, who are better than the material.

She’s managed a slick and shiny wish-fulfillment fantasy that is strictly downmarket — Hallmark movie chic.

Rating: R, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Camila Mendes, Archie Renaux, Lena Olin, Anthony Head, Rachel Matthews, Fola Evans-Akingbola, Aimee Carrero, Andrew Schultz, Thomas Kretschmann and Marisa Tomei

Credits: Directed by Carlson Young, scripted by Christine Lenig, Justin Matthews and Luke Spencer Roberts. An Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:45

There’s no reinventing the wheel when it comes to movies about addiction. We’re all familiar with the “steps” in screenplays that mimic “stages of grief” more than AA’s famous “twelve steps.”

Loved ones are tested and abused, impulses are indulged, weaknesses are exposed, pitied and loathed. Relapses, self-destructive lashing out, a stop for a “meeting,” resistance and either surrender “to a higher power” or to getting help or simply giving in to that addiction that is going to kill you, these are the tropes of movies about the subject, and “Bleeding Love” can’t avoid them.

But this story of a long-estranged father taking the 20 year-old he barely knows any more from San Diego to Sante Fe is wrapped in a poignance that isn’t hard to embrace. Whatever familiar situations we see a father (Ewan McGregor) experience with his trainwreck daughter (Clara McGregor) resonate in ways that overwhelm any urge to give this lightweight drama a “trite” dismissal.

We can attribute that to the redemptive and sometimes painfully helpless feeling of such stories. But actors and “baggage” play their part here, as well. Yes, Clara McGregor is a pretty “nepo baby.” I’d say what we recall about what dad Ewan put their family through trumps that, in this case, and gives this familiar story a forgiving tone that lifts it above that over-familiarity.

We meet them in dad’s battered ’80s Chevy Sierra pickup, the one with a “Highlands” landscaping logo on the side. He’s in his 40s, still with a hint of a Scots accent, and he’s driving his damaged 20 year-old daughter to rehab.

All his “You know I’ve been there” sympathy and “I was acting like a child, but I HAD a child” excuses fall on deaf ears. The daughter is dismissive, sneaky, quick to steal a drink from a fellow diner’s glass, shoplift bottles from a convenience store and make any rash decision that will get her that next buzz.

Even “You have no idea how lucky you are to be alive” doesn’t move her. Because she is. She OD’d the day before. He got the call from his ex. And since many of her earliest childhood memories are of her ever-entertaining father, blitzed and driving, tripping at a ball game or just “fun” in ways that suggest chemical assistance, he figures it’s time he took on this “make amends” step in his own life.

Screenwriter Ruby Caster turned this “reunion on the way to rehab” tale into a road picture, and director Emma Westenberg (“Stranger’s Arms”) keeps the collection of odd, funny, revealing and just plain random encounters short, biting and occasionaly sweet as we lumber down that long and well-worn highway.

A breakdown? Sure? Wildly eccentric tow-truck driver (Kim Zimmer)? OK. An impromptu birthday-party/truck-repair session, coming on to the drugs and booze-proving host of the party (Jake Weary), taking a forbidden after hours dip at a dumpy motel pool and indulging a death-by-chocolate-and-whipped-cream pancake breakfast the way the daughter liked them as a child are among the waypoints.

Will a lifetime of big and bigger mistakes set up the Biggest Mistake of All? Maybe. But not until after the father-daughter sing-along to the film’s title tune, “Bleeding Love” by Leona Lewis.

“I keep bleeding, keep keep bleeding love…”

Nothing here comes as much of a surprise, even the most “random” encounter of them all. Dad is a much more accomplished, subtle and expressive actor than his daughter, and the experience gap shows, here and there.

But the right emotional buttons are punched, enough of them at just the right moment for “Bleeding Love” to not bleed out. It plays like 12 step cinematic comfort food, and if you’re drawn to it and find yourself enjoying it, no “making amends” is necessary.

Rating: unrated, drug addiction, smoking, profanity

Cast: Ewan McGregor and Clara McGregor, Kim Zimmer and Jake Weary

Credits: Directed by Emma Westenberg, scripted by Ruby Caster. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:41

She’s an easy character for anybody who never got too deep into superhero comics to ignore. But when you’re monetizing your assetts at a film production company, no corner of the Spiderverse can be left unexplored.

So Sony’s piece of the Marvel pie, “Madame Web,” was a done deal as soon as that first mediocre (at best) “Venom” movie came out.

They held “Madame Web” from release until Valentine’s Day, in the generally slow month of February, and have suppressed reviews until the last minute.

But the trailers aren’t bad and Dakota Johnson is a pretty big name to shove into that part. Let’s see if it worked out. I hope, for the sake of the nation’s cinemas, it does.

(Seen it. Hated it. My review is linked here.)

Scripted by committee, performed in a nearly-indecipherable Jamaican patois and overseen by his legacy-protecting son Ziggy Marley, you knew the Bob Marley biopic “One Love” was going to have its problems and fall short of the mark in some important ways.

Hell, it points us towards a climactic concert and then ends — abruptly — just as that show is cranking up.

And if Paramount had thought “Bob Marley: One Love” was a triumph, they’d have released it during awards season and pushed to make it an Oscar contender.

But every movie is no more or less than what you, the viewer, take into it. And if this isn’t the musical bio pic we would have hoped this truly larger than life figure deserved, it is perfectly serviceable. The performances ensure that there’s a charismatic, recognizably-human icon at its center, flawed and passionate and downright messianic at times.

And Kingsley Ben-Adir‘s performance in the title role towers above the film surrounding him, as does Lashana Lynch‘s driven, layered turn as Bob’s soulmate, backup singer and conscience — Rita Marley.

Yes, that’s producer Ziggy Marley’s sanitizing influence on the film showing. When Dad had more illegitimate children than those born in or adopted into marriage, you could see why a musician-son would want to “supervise” the way Dad is depicted.

The misshapen script that “King Richard” director Reinaldo Marcus Green wrestles with — he is one of four credited screenwriters — bounces around the Jamaica torn by political strife in the mid-’70s, back to Bob’s childhood and memories of his mother and the white colonialist father he never knew, and into the superstardom that had him vowing to use his popularity to bring unity to Jamaica.

Oh, and the creation of his seminal LP “Exodus” is touched on, as is his fervent desire, despite management’s efforts to cash in with richer audienes, to perform in Africa.

Ben-Adir sometimes sings and picks out tunes, the origins of “Exodus,” “Three Little Birds” (“Don’t Worry about a Thing”), etc., and sometimes lip-syncs to Marley’s distinctive Rastafarian reggae wail.

He utterly masters the physicality of the man, a lithe, athletic Rastafarian ganga smoker who sought God in daily life throught music and grooved to a rhythm all his own.

The funniest line in the film speaks to that most musical English patois, Jamaican, which is both understandable and indecipherable and in need of subtitles much of the time.

“I’m sorry, say again?”

Ben-Adir and Lynch have no trouble getting across the meaning of their scenes — arguments, debates, accusations and professions of love. But a lot of the words are lost much of the time.

“Sometimes, da messenger become de message,” Rita tells him, and considering how popular he was, far and wide, by the moment of his untimely death at 36, we get it.

All along, Bob is committed to “mekk a rekkod dot wan steenk up de place.” Not that he ever did.

Marley’s “team” is a faction of hard-driving bottom-liner Brits (James Norton) and Americans (Michael Gandolfini) and a trusted Jamaican road manager who might be bribable (Anthony Welsh).

Major names from his story — early bandmates, etc. — are given short shrift. Some of the rockers who flocked to him — Jagger and Joe Strummer among them — are glimpsed.

It’s a film of compromises, with many of those working against giving us a complete portrait of the man beyond the legend. But it’s also immersive, letting us see the ferment that created him, the Rastafarianism that shaped his worldview and the flawed people who supported him and were supported by him.

And through all this messiness, something like the man emerges, the music endures — we see songs born — and a true fan is sure to find the pearls to cling to amidst everything that gets lost in debates and outright historical revisionism.

Lynch (“The Woman King”) is a marvel and Ben-Adir (“One Night in Miami”) gives a committed, career-defining performance at the heart of this sometimes stumbling musical maelstrom.

For some of us, that’s going to be enough. Because while a great Bob Marley documentary is already out there, this may be the one time a big studio picture about his life and music is attempted. Even if it falls short of hopes, it’s still worth taking in, if only for the memories — fond and emotional — his name and his music still engender.

Rating: PG-13 for violence, marijuana use and smoking throughout and some profanity.

Cast: Kingsley Ben-Adir, Lashana Lynch, James Norton, Anthony Welsh, Michael Gandolfini, Quan-Dajai Henriques and Nia Ashi.

Credits: Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, scripted by Terrence Winter, Frank E. Flowers, Zach Baylin and Reinaldo Marcus Green. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:44