BONO: STORIES OF SURRENDER - Mark Reviews Movies

Bono: Stories of Surrender, Apple TV+

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 29, 2025

The genesis of Bono: Stories of Surrender mostly gets at why this hybrid of documentary and concert movie mainly succeeds in the second regard. Director Andrew Dominik's movie is a filmed version of U2 frontman Bono's one-man stage show, which incorporates personal stories and reconfigured versions of some of his band's biggest hits. Everything here is stripped down to the basics, which the man himself jokes about early into the show—pointing out that U2 has a long history of concerts of massive sets and assorted gimmickry. In Bono's sort-of tell-all, he's just on a stage with a few pieces of furniture and three other musicians—none of them part of his band.

This show seems to have taken on a life of its own, even before this documentary. Another of Bono's throwaway jokes is about how the entire project is also technically a book tour. Yes, Stories of Surrender: An Evening of Words, Music and Some Mischief... was initially spearheaded as an effort to promote Bono's memoir Surrenders: 40 Songs, One Story. If the whole thing is already starting to feel like an elaborate act of self-promotion, Bono also has an answer for that while he's telling his stories and singing his songs in a Broadway theater seemingly filled to capacity.

To want to be great at something, as the singer has wanted to be since childhood, is inherently selfish, he argues. It's refreshing that he's honest about that, as well as cheekily hinting at some form of selfishness in his motives for charity and activism, but he almost doesn't need to be in this context. After all, Bono wrote a book about himself that turned into a Broadway show about his life and accomplishments, which is now a movie showcasing all of those things and apparently adding a more intimate interlude in which the man offers a confessional to explain himself even further.

There are layers here, in other words, which must have appealed to Dominik and certainly makes Bono's self-aggrandizing project seem more complex than it actually is. The irony of the movie, though, is that it's far more engaging when it's just its star telling stories without the apologetics and singing the songs we know in versions that let us focus on the lyrics and Bono's vocalization. The popularity of U2 is, no doubt, the result of the entire band's collective effort and talents. Bono fully acknowledges that here, too, giving his bandmates proper introductions, by way of three empty chairs, and credit, by way of including them in all of the stories about the music, but he might sell himself short in the department of the band's success.

He's a born performer or, perhaps, one born out of the desire to gain the attention of his opera-singing father. The narrative of this one-man show is basically divided in two. Half of it is the story of the forming and rise of U2, told by way of amusing but disjointed anecdotes about the band meeting in high school (when Bono also met the girl who would become his wife, which feels like a story really worth more attention, given that the two have been married for more than 40 years), rehearsing in a building in the cemetery where his mother is buried, and some inside-the-business tales.

This part mostly comes across as an excuse for Bono to belt out hits like "Sunday Bloody Sunday," "Pride (In the Name of Love)," "Desire," "Where the Streets Have No Name," "With or Without You," and more. The accompaniment for those tunes, though, consists of a cellist, a harpist, and a keyboardist/percussionist, and the simplicity of the arrangements is their strongest element. Bono probably knows he doesn't need to point out his own talents when the show lets them speak for themselves.

The other part of the narrative traces the singer's relationship with his father, an Irish Catholic man who would marry a Protestant woman, have two children with her, and become a relatively young widower when Bono's mother died when the singer was still a teenager. The unfolding of these decades of that often-strained father-son bond shows Bono's skill as a storyteller and, surprisingly, an actor, since he plays both himself and his father in little scenes of the two men meeting over the years at a local pub.

Him wrestling with that relationship—what it meant for Bono as a son, as a man who could have been his father's friend, and as a father himself—gets at some fundamental truth about the man and wisdom more generally. It's surely more compelling and consistent a piece of storytelling than the rest of the show, which broadly deals with his faith and 2016 medical emergency.

That it is, always remains, and constantly calls attention to the fact that this is a show, however, might be the main issue here. Bono is always performing in this movie, because that's the nature of the medium Dominik is capturing and the experience the filmmaker is re-creating with this movie. The most sincere parts of Bono: Stories of Surrender, then, are when the eponymous man embraces performance—making grand statements about his sense of purpose in life, telling tales with flair, singing those songs. The very format of the material, though, prevents this movie—not to mention the subject himself—from feeling truly honest on any deeper level.

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