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Bono's unvarnished earnestness makes his Stories Of Surrender worth hearing

The U2 frontman continues opening up in the engaging, moving filmed stage memoir.

Bono's unvarnished earnestness makes his Stories Of Surrender worth hearing

In November 2022, Bono, the frontman of globe-straddling Irish rock band U2, set out on a 14-date book tour for Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, a memoir he cooked up during the pandemic shutdown. While based around read (and often acted out) passages as well as stripped-down musical performances, these shows also included extemporaneous monologues and other shards of recollection. Bono: Stories Of Surrender is (if one can keep up) a discrete, unique, black-and-white film adaptation of the stage adaptation of “me book what I wrote meself,” as Bono says. 

While chiefly serving as an engaging conversation piece for those already familiar with the man and his band, director Andrew Dominik’s film is also an artistic, effectively streamlined celebration of reflection. Through its subject’s intensely personal reminiscences, a moving treatise emerges on the inherent value of identifying, exercising, and in some cases exorcising the angels and demons that most animate us.

Bono is a curiously polarizing figure across swaths of the Internet, for reasons that are sometimes difficult to pin down. Part of it can be traced to the automatic-download iTunes release of 2014’s Songs Of Innocence, which really bothered a lot of Millennials who now readily accept all manner of technological intrusion into their lives. A bit of it is from the “shut-up-and-sing” crowd who’ve grown tired of his activism, though that’s an odd stance for any fan who was ever serious about U2, since they’ve supported their beliefs for decades.

If you ask around, though, it’s Bono’s general “too-muchness” that seems triggering for most detractors. That sentiment is most rooted in his impulse to overshare, to deconstruct the image of the messianic rock star. Some U2 songs, like “Sunday Bloody Sunday” or “Pride (In The Name Of Love),” tell obvious stories. But Bono has always been driven to both explain the narrative inspirations of almost every song and, in U2’s lyrics, to engage in no small amount of self-devaluation.

For people who instinctively crave a bit more mystery and swagger in their rock ‘n’ roll, that makes him uncool. The counterargument to this is that, by putting the roiling inner contradictions he feels on front street, Bono is actually more authentic and refreshing. It’s that unvarnished earnestness that is at the core of Stories Of Surrender‘s appeal. This is a work, in both its chosen stories and its form, which tries to reach out and bridge divides—divides between family and friends, divides in the world, and divides one can feel within themselves.

The film opens with Bono bringing a dark poeticism to his recounting of a health scare (a blister on his aorta during Christmas 2016). The rest of the stories will be largely familiar to U2 fans. There’s the exaltation of his wife Ali and his bandmates (the latter represented by three empty chairs), all of whom he met in the span of one week as a teenager. The youngest son of a Catholic father and Protestant mother, the defining event of Bono’s adolescence was when, at 14, his mother Iris collapsed and died at her father’s funeral, leaving Bono adrift in a home where grief was unspoken about.

There are amusing digressions too. Considerable time is given to the story of how Luciano Pavarotti (much to the consternation of Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr.) crashed a band rehearsal to pitch a concert performance debuting “Miss Sarajevo” in Modena, Italy. Bono injects levity into the crisis of faith that three members of U2’s early-career dalliance with the devout Christian sect Shalom brought about, noting manager Paul McGuinness’ shrewd parrying of their consideration of dissolving the group: “Would God think it okay to break a legal contract?”

A lot of Stories Of Surrender, of course, unpacks Bono’s relationship with his emotionally distant father Bob, with whom he would have weekly pub get-togethers later in life, searching for an answer to his dad’s standard question (“Anything strange or startling?”) that would actually impress him. “I spent most of my life trying to figure out the opera inside my father’s head,” Bono says. “He didn’t hear me… so I sang louder. And louder.”

U2’s music has always been made for stadiums, but the size of their sound and showmanship has frequently overshadowed the band’s canny instincts for staging, and ability to locate intimacy within unusual spaces. That skill is again on display in Stories Of Surrender, which features a minimalistic stage and style from longtime U2 set designer Willie Williams, but also leans into a couple flourishes (a bank of flashing background lights) that provide nods to emotional grandiosity.

Joining Bono onstage are musical supervisor Jacknife Lee, with Kate Ellis on cello and Gemma Doherty on harp and other instruments. Roughly a dozen U2 songs—from “Vertigo,” “City Of Blinding Lights,” and “Out Of Control” (famously penned on Bono’s 18th birthday) to “I Will Follow” and “With Or Without You”—receive evocative treatment, though typically in abbreviated snippets that connect to the time period or feeling of a particular monologue.

Stories Of Surrender is lensed as a narrative feature, and performed for the camera rather than the audience, who remain almost scrupulously in the deep background and/or out of focus, except for an opening credit sequence eight minutes in and a moment of catharsis late in the movie’s brisk, 86-minute runtime. This lack of accommodating audience close-ups or cutaways is one of Dominik’s most sensible, elevating directorial moves. He’s not trying to tell one how to feel, but letting his subject’s vulnerability carry the day.

Stage-locked, over-the-shoulder shots are a staple of both concert films and performer biopics, but Dominik (The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford) and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt keep the camera active, choosing interesting angles, pressing in and moving out, circling their subject. Combined with a monochrome presentation that heightens details and forces a viewer to contemplate Bono’s wearied, introspective expressiveness, the resultant work conveys both a rascally energy and a sense of serene settledness—of succumbing to greater powers, wherever one finds them.

U2 has long leaned into state-of-the-art technology, from pioneering ZooTV and U2 360° world tours and a 3D concert film to their more recent venue-opening residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas. Stories Of Surrender continues this trend, releasing in both 2D and as the first feature-length film in the Apple Immersive Video format, for the Apple Vision Pro headset.

The immersive edition required essentially filming the production twice, with two different sets of cameras, and it’s easy to view this element as a nice add-on, but not necessarily essential. One imagines in virtual reality a certain thrill in sharing the stage amidst the swirling yellow cursive of Bono’s handwriting that occasionally punctuate proceedings, plus a couple moments of judiciously used “double Bonos,” as when he breaks the fourth wall to assay the hypocrisy of being a rich activist.

Still, it’s the words and their thematic throughline that do the heaviest lifting in Stories Of Surrender. When Bono wryly notes, “You might not want to give up the emptiness that gave you everything,” it conveys the thoughtfulness and tumultuous spirituality of a man who’s never stopped trying to throw his arms around the world, even as he recognizes and grapples with the roots and personal cost of that zealotry.

Director: Andrew Dominik
Release Date: May 30, 2025 (Apple TV+)

 
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