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No reggae performer has had the global reach of the Jamaican singer-songwriter, who passed away in 1981 from cancer at the age of 36.
In fact, few artists of any genre have had his impact.
A lot of that is down simply to the strength of his songs.
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'No Woman, No Cry,' 'Three Little Birds,' 'One Love (People Get Ready),' 'Buffalo Soldier,' 'Exodus,' 'Redemption Song,' 'Jammin',' 'Get Up Stand Up' and 'I Shot The Sheriff' are all classics whose popularity was sealed by the huge success in 1984 of the 'Legend' compilation album which sold 29 million copies worldwide.
Marley's reputation as a live performer is also the stuff of legend.
However it is his lyrics that retain their power to this day, combined with an iconic image of Marley on t-shirts, posters and other merchandise to rival that of Che Guevara's.
Marley is still seen as a powerful and relevant voice for the Third World, the downtrodden, the dispossssed, for peace, resistance and justice.
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And it is this aspect of his career that is the focus of Reinaldo Marcus Green's biographical drama 'Bob Marley: One Love'.
Green's movie zones in on the events that inspired Bob Marley and The Wailers' greatest album 'Exodus' and the One Love peace concert in Jamaica.
Kingsley Ben-Adir plays the singer who at the start of the film is seen playing football in 1976 with his sons and his friends in the suburbs of Kingstown.
Jamaica, however, is in turmoil and the game is interrupted by a gun attack on a nearby car.
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Driving home with his kids, we witness police roadblocks as violence flares on the streets.
We also learn that Marley's fellow Rastafarians nurse a deep suspicion of the police following a history of intimidation.
With Jamaica's politicians bitterly trading blows too, Bob is planning a concert urging all sides to come together.
However his wife, Lashana Lynch's Rita is concerned that in the current febrile political atmosphere his intervention may only inflame passions.
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Bob still goes ahead with plans for the gig and while he and The Wailers rehearse, gunmen enter his home shooting Rita in her car and attempting to kill him but wounding his manager, Anthony Welsh's Don Taylor instead.
With Rita sustaining a head injury and Don a bullet wound to the stomach, Bob rushes to the hospital to be by her side but is also puzzled as to why he was targeted.
Urged by his bandmates to leave the country, he sounds out Brian Todd Boucher's gang leader Claude Massop who strenuously denies his faction was responsible.
Pressing ahead with the concert, the Wailers are remarkably joined by Rita onstage fresh from hospital - her head bandaged.
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However fuelled by images of one of the gunmen possibly attending the gig, Bob decides afterwards to go to London with the band to record new material while his wife and kids head to Delaware to live with his mum.
During the recordings, Bob pushes the band to find a new sound and the legendary 'Exodus' album begins to take shape.
However with Jamaica still in turmoil and its rival political leaders Michael Manley and Edward Seaga bitterly divided, how long will it be before its most famous son will feel compelled to intervene?
As movies about music icons go, 'Bob Marley: One Love's is a fairly routine affair - rattling through all the singer's hits in an engaging, if unspectacular storyline.
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At times, Terence Winter, Frank E Flowers, Zach Baylin and Reinaldo Marcus Green's screenplay just feels too perfunctory, as if the director is simply ticking off events in Marley's later life.
It's a bit too much of hagiography - not willing to dive too deep into the singer's life.
Peppering the movie with brief, occasionally dreamy flashbacks, the writers dip into how Bob became a Rastafarian and his childhood curiosity with a father he did not really know who may have been white.
However these moments feel really vague and there's a sense that Green and his writers are only ever scratching the surface.
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Lip service is paid to the singer's womanising and the strains it placed on his marriage to Rita during a row they have outside a Paris concert venue but that's all folks.
But that's about it.
Green seems to be hurrying us along, insisting there's nothing really to see.
In fact, Green's movie comes across as being simply too timid to properly explore the full complexity of Bob Marley's life.
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Even the way the assassination attempt is handled never really gets to the bottom of what happened and its resolution later on in the film feels a bit too neat.
It's as if Green is saying: "Yeah that shooting was terrible. Here's another hit song!"
All of this detracts from a film which is watchable, thanks to a magnetic performance by Kingsley Ben-Adir as the singer songwriter.
Ben-Adir takes the same approach as Jamie Foxx in the Ray Charles biopic 'Ray,' lip-synching to Marley's vocals but he gets his mannerisms and cadence down to a tee.
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However his portrayal of Bob is a little too much saint and very little sinner.
That's hardly his fault - it's all down to the writing.
When she is cut loose, though, Lynch is very good as Rita.
Tosin Cole, Hector Lewis, Sevana and Aston Barrett Jr as Wailers members Tyrone Downie, Carlton Carly Barrett, Judy Mowatt and Aston Barrett are solid enough in their thinly written supporting roles.
Anthony Welsh does what's required of him as Don Taylor, Brian Todd Boucher and Cornelius Grant as the rival gang leader Claude Massop and Bucky Marshall catch the eye.
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James Norton, however, is handed a bit of an insipid role as the Island Records label founder, Chris Backwell and just seems to hang around proceedings like some sort of English Jiminy Cricket, while Michael Gandolfini pops up briefly as the American music industry publicist Howard Bloom.
From Robert Elswit's cinematography to Anne B Shepphard's costume design to Chris Lowe's production design, the whole venture is perfectly adequate.
But that's the problem.
'Bob Marley: One Love' has a "that'll do" mentality that seeps through pretty much every aspect of the film.
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Its unwillingness to really push itself means it considerably lags behind the best music industry biopics.
It falls a long distance short of James Mangold's Johnny Cash story 'Walk The Line,' Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D'Sa's Terri Hooley tale 'Good Vibrations,' Anton Corbijn's Ian Curtis pic 'Control' or Sofia Coppola's more recent 'Priscilla'.
With several members of the Marley family producing, you suspect Green just didn't have the appetite to rock the boat.
And while 'Bob Marley: One Love' is far from being the worst movie you'll see in 2024, it's also far from being one of the best.
Here's hoping the Amy Winehouse biopic later this year is braver.
('Bob Marley: One Love' was released in UK and Irish cinemas on February 16, 2024)
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