Bono’s memoir gets a third iteration, this time on the small screen
“Writing a memoir is a whole other level of navel-gazing,” the eponymous navel gazer tells us at the top of the new Apple TV+ release “Bono: Stories of Surrender.” What, then, is a concert film of a stage show adapted from a memoir?
Pretty good is what, at least for viewers not incurably afflicted with Bono derangement syndrome. You know who you are. To U2-curious persuadables, I say unto thee that the water is warm.
Inspired, it would appear, by “Springsteen on Broadway,” the solo show the Boss wrung from his autobiography “Born to Run,” Bono booked a short tour of theaters in 2023 to translate at least some of the 576-page “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” published the previous fall, to the singer’s natural habitat. For musical accompaniment of what he gamely promoted as “tall tales of a short rock star,” the Artist Never Known as Paul Hewson considered bringing along his constant collaborator the Edge, but opted instead for a trio that would give his usual band’s familiar songs an unfamiliar sound: keyboardist (and occasional U2 producer) Jacknife Lee, cellist Kate Ellis and harpist Gemma Doherty. A few performances at New York’s 2,900-seat Beacon Theatre were filmed.
Like the book that inspired it, the film of the show opens with Bono’s account of his December 2016 cardiac surgery. “I was born with an eccentric heart,” he declares. He’s probably not intending to misquote Sia, but this kind of wordplay appeals to Bono and his father/offstage co-star Bob Hewson, given their joshing conflation of “paparazzi” and “Pavarotti” some moments later.
Indeed, while “Surrender” the book was a shamelessly name-dropping affair, Luciano Pavarotti is the only non-U2-affiliated famous person discussed at any length on-screen. Bono shares a funny anecdote about U2’s rhythm section making themselves scarce when the Italian tenor crashes a mid-1990s recording session with a camera crew in tow.
The elder Hewson, who died of cancer in 2001, is the ghost who haunts the film. Bono was 14 when his mother, Iris, suffered an aneurysm while attending her father’s funeral, dying soon after. Her widower, Bob, “expressed” his grief by never speaking of her again. Like his friend Bruuuuuuuce before him, Bono retroactively diagnoses his stadium-size ambitions as a plea for his distant father’s attention. In the silent, suffocating house the Hewsons shared in violent, suffocating mid-1970s Dublin, Bono’s big brother, Norman, gave him a guitar, planting the seeds for the totemic week a couple of years later when he would meet his wife of four decades plus, Alison Stewart, and join the band that was not yet called U2. “One week in high school, and my whole life, sorted!” Bono marvels. “Sort of.”
“Stories of Surrender” the movie abjures the book’s examination of Bono’s activism, and his negotiation thereof with his not-always-on-board band, in favor of more intimate subjects. Bono uses his da’s typical conversation prompt — “Anything strange or startling?” — as a rhetorical device throughout this svelte, engaging movie, which like most concert films runs significantly shorter than the show it recorded. (The theatrically released 2023 Beyoncé and Taylor Swift movies documenting those two stars’ stadium tours from that year were the exceptions that proved this rule.)
Veterans of U2’s 21st-century road shows may find some of this material familiar. On the Vertigo Tour 20 years ago, Bono recalled his late father’s propensity for “conducting” opera records with his late mother’s knitting needles to introduce the then-new song “Sometimes You Can’t Make It on Your Own.” Years later, the filmed final date of the 2018 Experience + Innocence Tour found Bono reflecting that Bob believed that “to dream was to be disappointed, and he didn’t want that for me.” That line, too, is reprised here. But hey, they’re his lines. No one who was ever tempted to throw something at their TV during the Grammys could possibly be under the impression Bono only just started talking about himself.
Four months after these shows at the Beacon, U2 began a 40-night residency celebrating their 1991 album “Achtung Baby” at Las Vegas’ Sphere, becoming the first act to headline the state-of-the-art $2.2 billion venue. They had been offered this spot in deference to their decades-long history of creating stage spectacles that pushed the boundaries of design and tech. (Also of taste, in the infamous episode when they installed their 2014 “Songs of Innocence” album uninvited onto every iPhone in the world.) In this exploratory vein, “Stories of Surrender” is also the first feature released for Apple Vision Pro, a wearable virtual-reality computer that retails for a cool $3,499. I saw it in a conventional movie theater, splitting the difference between just watching it from my sofa and jacking into the Matrix.
Musically, the film is revelatory. Only a handful of tunes in U2’s 40-plus-year catalog have featured women’s vocals — though I bet you didn’t know that was Chrissie Hynde contributing to the whoa-oh oh-ohs on “Pride (in the Name of Love),” the 1984 anthem that Live Aid founder Bob Geldof said was good enough for him to forgive Bono his mullet (as the repentant ex-mulleteer reveals here). Ellis and Doherty, in particular, lend so much revealing color to these fresh arrangements of U2 standards such as “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Beautiful Day” that you wonder why the band hasn’t invited women to sing along more often.
Shooting in crisp monochrome, director Andrew Dominik (“Chopper,” “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”) has higher aspirations than the unadorned documentation of a stage play. While his technique is graceful enough to be largely invisible, there are a few winning flourishes. When Bono ruminates on whether the overlap of his long advocacy on behalf of the world’s poor and his own lavish lifestyle makes him a hypocrite, Dominik looks away from the Bono who’s speaking to show us another Bono, this one keeping mum as he’s dressed and groomed by a retinue of attendants.
In the final section, Dominik’s camera pans up from the Beacon audience in New York and appears to travel through the venue’s roof to show us the glittering skyline of … Sorrento, Italy, an ocean away. As the credits roll, Bono sings “The Showman (Little More Better),” a self-mocking number from U2’s “Songs of Experience” album, the most recent song in the film by many years. Sample lyric: “I got just enough low self-esteem/ To get me where I want to go.”
Anything strange or startling? Plenty. Rewarding, too.
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“Bono: Stories of Surrender”
Streaming now on Apple TV+