Bono: Stories of Surrender, directed by Andrew Dominik, is streaming now on Apple TV+
It’s Bono as you’ve never seen him before. Yes, the U2 frontman sings a bit. But where Stories of Surrender really becomes a true test of tolerance for the man is when he is acting selected stories from his hefty 2022 memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, on a darkened stage as if he were auditioning for the role of himself in his own biopic. He gives it his all. It’s occasionally entertaining, but it’s mostly cloyingly awful.
It might seem that, as Bruce Springsteen did with his autobiography Born to Run, Bono took his book and made a solo show and concert film to go with it. But Springsteen on Broadway played for a year, made millions, and left an album and a Netflix special.
Bono’s run extended to a dozen shows in front of fan club members at the Beacon Theatre on Broadway, then a finale – for reasons that become apparent at the end – at the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, the world’s oldest continuously active opera house.
This movie for Apple TV+ isn’t a record of the shows, it’s the reason for it. They make for a backdrop with an adoring audience who know when the woooah-woooahs come in as the singer and his backers – a cellist, harpist and keyboardist-percussionist – offer stripped-back takes on U2 anthems, as the frontman pretty much sings them like he always does while throwing his usual shapes up front.
The rearrangements aren’t anything special and there’s barely a complete song in the 86 minutes.
Much of the film is taken up with Bono in the role of past Bonos. He starts with his cardiac health scare in 2016, moves on to the death of his mother when he was 14, his difficult relationship with his father even after he had become a success. There’s the birth of U2 in a progressive Dublin high school, his long marriage to the woman he met the same week he first encountered his bandmates, and more. The people in his life are represented by empty chairs. A table becomes his operating table and his father’s deathbed. In that sequence you can’t help but think: “Hasn’t your Da suffered enough? And can you please stop rearranging the furniture?”
Sometimes you have to wonder if Kiwi/Australian director Andrew Dominik, who shoots the thing in the monochrome of the band’s hit-making 80s heyday, actually likes his leading man.
But even if you thought Bono’s book was a perfectly good rock memoir from an articulate man who once fronted the biggest band in the world, Stories of Surrender will leave you defeated. And yes, it has to be said, it lacks Edge.
Rating out of five: ★★
