Rather than do a simple book tour for his 2022 memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, U2 front man Bono did a series of theater appearances that were more like a one-man musical/book re-enactment, including the one captured at New York’s Beacon Theatre in the film Bono: Stories of Surrender. During the performance, captured in shimmering black-and-white by director Andrew Dominik (who has worked on varies filmed projects with Nick Cave, as well as features such as Blonde and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), Bono walks and talks on stage, moving chairs around to represent his fellow band members, his late father, and even his wife, to tell the story of his life as a rock star, husband, son, and activist. It doesn’t take long for us to realize that often these various roles were in direct conflict with each other and that his entire life has been about finding ways to help them co-exist.
Bono opens the show with the most recent story, about his 2016 heart surgery, which was perhaps the greatest test of endurance and spirituality he’d ever faced. Certainly a man of faith most of his adult life, he says that while he was at his closest to death, he reached out to God, and God wasn’t there. A bit of shock for the Catholic-raised Irishman, he also looked at it as a moment where he had to be fully self-reliant.
As his storytelling continues, the three musicians join him on stage: music director/producer Jacknife Lee, Kate Ellis, and Gemma Doherty, providing a subtle soundtrack to his words and often transitioning into familiar songs in wildly different arrangements than U2 gave them. The show is meant to be more intimate at every turn, and these sparse but still soaring tunes make it all the more so.
At times, Bono’s wild thrashing on stage feels more like performance art than a simple storytelling, and it doesn’t always work. Certainly lines and jokes don’t land like he clearly thinks they will, whether they are humorous or dramatic in nature. But no matter where he takes us on his journey, it’s the moment he recalls sitting (often in silence) at the local pub with his father that are the most meaningful. It’s clear that not everything we see on screen was done before an audience. The camera gets too close to its subject in certain moments, and Bono’s acting skills aren’t always up to the challenge of pretending he's standing in front of several hundred people. Not that he or Dominick is trying to fool us, but it does break the live feel of much of the production, and I’m not sure it’s always worth it.
The actual live shows were considerably longer than this film (which clocks in under 90 minutes), and a couple more songs would have been nice, especially since the whole premise of his book is that 40 songs can tell his story just as well as a proper memoir. The personal revelations are great, but it still feels like he’s giving us the legend rather than the truth. His language is too vivid (not a complaint) to feel like anything he’s telling us is 100 percent factual, but I don’t think I’d want to drop any of the versions of these events from the show. The film is not a proper pulling-back of the curtain, or perhaps it is but instead of us looking backstage, we’re already backstage looking at these retold events on stage. I’m glad Bono got these stories told and captured on film for posterity, but I can’t imagine I’d ever feel compelled to watch this work again.
The film is now streaming on Apple TV+
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