Reggae legend Jimmy Cliff was in a Kingston recording studio when Perry Henzell, a Jamaican director whose company made commercials, came into the session to meet him.

``He said, `I'm making a movie. Do you think you can write the music for it?' '' Cliff recalls from New York. ``I said, `Can I do it? I can do anything!' ''

Cliff, as it turns out, wasn't being cocky or over confident. He didn't just write several now-classic songs for Henzell's 1972 movie, The Harder They Come: He also became its star.

The edgy, exciting movie-with-music became a cult classic, one that helped introduce reggae to the larger world and propel Cliff's career to a higher level. More than three decades later, Henzell's masterwork was reconceived as musical theater in London. And on Saturday, the British production begins its only U.S. run at Miami's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.

Henzell loosely based his screenplay (cowritten with Jamaican playwright Trevor Rhone) on the true story of Ivanhoe ``Rhygin'' Martin. Martin was a Jamaican outlaw gunned down by the police in 1948, a guy who taunted the cops by writing ``I was here, but I disappear'' on walls.

The director had the notion of making a once-innocent country boy named Ivan O. Martin into an aspiring singer who turns bad after he's cheated by a record producer. He assembled a cast of many nonactors, including Cliff, a handsome and wiry Island Records artist. Cliff's photos on an album cover -- one on the front radiating openness and innocence, the other on the back suggesting a dangerous edge -- made Henzell think the singer could pull off Ivan's emotional journey.

``I thought Perry was really intelligent in directing. He would say, `How would you do that?' That's why it came out so real,'' Cliff says. ``I knew about the character. Ivan's name shook terror in the hearts and minds of people.''

With its shots of the lush Jamaican countryside, diamond dots of sunshine sparkling on the Caribbean and the blinding white sand of the beach where a defiant Ivan is gunned down, The Harder They Come is a dazzling amalgam of gritty travelogue, shocking crime film and neorealist music video. Its famous soundtrack includes songs by the Melodians, the Maytals, Desmond Dekker, the Slickers and four numbers by Cliff, including the haunting Many Rivers to Cross and the title song.

In his lyrics to The Harder They Come, Cliff perfectly encapsulates Ivan's yearning and determination. In the final verse of a song that is jaunty and threatening, he sings, ``And I keep on fighting for the things I want/Though I know that when you're dead you can't/But I'd rather be a free man in my grave/Than living as a puppet or a slave.''

REGGAE EXPLOSION

The movie, Cliff says, ``really propelled me to another level, all over the world. I was big in Europe but not that big in the United States. I couldn't have toured there for two to three months, as I did after the movie.''

Island Records founder Chris Blackwell also made the most of Henzell's movie by booking Bob Marley for concerts in cities where the film had played. Suddenly, reggae was everywhere.

One of those who noticed was Jan Ryan, a British theater producer who wound up coproducing the stage version of The Harder They Come.

``I saw the film in the early '70s. That and Bob Marley's visit to the U.K. got me into Jamaican culture,'' Ryan says from London. ``I first met Perry in 2003-2004. I kept e-mailing him saying, `I want to do this.' ''

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