Bono On the Big Screen

Forty-five years into his career, Bono has earned his victory lap, and although this movie won’t do anything to convert cynics, Bono: Stories of Surrender nevertheless offers fans a chance to experience his songwriting process in real time. It is, he reveals, “the tall tales of a short rock star,” showcasing self-awareness and wit.

In many ways, Andrew Dominik’s just-released documentary is a more accessible alternative to the U2 frontman’s memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. Filmed in 2023, Bono submerges himself in the memories, recalling that he met his wife Ali the same week he joined the band. Surrounded by session musicians, the singer-songwriter slows the tracks down, echoing the pain behind some of the words. True, Adam Clayton’s bass inflections are occasionally missed, but this reinvention only serves to showcase how meaningful they are for the man formerly known as Paul Hewson. Produced in stunning black-and-white photography, the cinematography recalls Anton Corbijn’s iconic photos taken of the band during The Joshua Tree project.

Describing the concert as “preposterous navel-gazing”, the singer-songwriter uses spoken word segments to introduce sections of this concert. Given the nature of the situation, free from the other three bandmates, Bono intersperses aspects of his life into the set. “It sounds almost too Irish,” he sighs, recalling that his last memory of his mother was at a family funeral. Like John Lennon before him, Bono lost a parent in adolescence, a death that shaped his music explicitly (“Tomorrow”) and subliminally (“Lemon”). Many rock stars are damaged people, no doubt reaching out for a side of them that was cruelly robbed at an early age.

Yet just as the night gets a bit heavy, the Irishman alleviates the tension with a heightened impression of Luciano Pavarotti, a nod of the head back to their duet on 1997’s “Miss Sarajevo.”

Stripped of virtually all the artifice of rock, Bono serenades to a chair, the dance meant to illustrate the bond between him and his wife. Bombastic anthems “Vertigo” and “City of Blinding Lights” hit their marks, but the most affecting tune of the evening belongs to “Iris”, a gentle ballad U2 released on their underappreciated 2014 record Songs of Innocence.

Applying images to a rock tempo, Bono gingerly sweeps audience and listeners into the imagery with the Apple Vision Pro headset platform, a device that plots animation and footage from other cameras onto the forefront, to deliver a melody crackling with yearning and passion. If this film can do one thing for the band’s catalogue, it would be to put this composition headfirst into the lexicon.

This style of storytelling is rare. Paul McCartney flirted with the genre in 2005 with Chaos and Creation at Abbey Road, a rare moment of humility from the ex-Beatle revealing how he arranged himself. But that’s limited compared to the guttural energy Bono goes into here. Yes, Bono: Stories of Surrender is indulgent, but he’s always been happy to let people laugh at him.

Released by Apple, this is one of those works that might work better on a small screen than an IMAX cinema. But somehow that’s probably the point. He isn’t performing these songs with U2, but by himself, and by stripping all that grandeur away, what we see is a fragile artist keen to pour his heart out, much as he did on October and War all those years ago. This is one-fourth of the band bearing their soul on a stage, and we are lucky enough to witness it.

-Eoghan Lyng

Photo: Getty Images