THE STORY – Bono shares life stories and U2 songs in an intimate show, exploring relationships with family, friends, and faith.
THE CAST – Bono
THE TEAM – Andrew Dominik (Director)
THE RUNNING TIME – 87 Minutes
Directed by Andrew Dominik (“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”, “Blonde”) and premiering in the Special Screenings section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, this is a re-imagined version of Bono’s acclaimed one-man stage show, “Stories of Surrender: An Evening of Words, Music and Some Mischief…” As such, it has a lot of words, a bit of music, and not really very much mischief, but it’s consistently entertaining, occasionally moving, and beautifully put together.
Shot in gorgeous black-and-white by cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, and taking place in a concert venue that’s deliberately concealed until the end of the film, the stage show combines music and spoken word performance, with U2 frontman and all-around rock star Bono (real name Paul Hewson) telling a series of revealing anecdotes about his life, interspersed with solo versions of some of U2’s greatest hits, including “Where The Streets Have No Name,” “With or Without You,” and “Sunday, Bloody Sunday”. Based on Bono’s own memoir, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” the stage show is nominally divided into chapters, which appear on screen as digitally scrawled hand-written captions (complete with sound effect), in vivid yellow.
Bono’s opening section gives an immediate example of what to expect, in terms of just how raw and personal the stories are going to be. He tells the audience he was born with “an eccentric heart”, meaning a blister on his aorta, and proceeds to describe the operation. Despite the graphic nature of the experience he’s describing, Bono’s delivery and tone are compelling throughout – the lines have a rhythmic, lyrical quality to them, almost like spoken-word poetry at times.
In addition, Bono comes across extremely well on stage. He’s relaxed, charismatic, and charmingly disingenuous at all times. Commenting on the absence of the other three U2 members (who he nevertheless “introduces,” despite the fact that they’re not there), Bono calls the event his “quarter man show,” at one point getting big laughs by disarmingly quipping, “I’m still pretending this is a book tour” after banging out a rousing version of “Vertigo.”
The material isn’t exactly rich in biographical detail – there’s almost certainly nothing here that will be new to die-hard Hewson fans. But it does a decent job of covering the essentials, most notably the fact that Bono met both the future members of his band and his future wife, Alison Stewart (then 15) in the same week while at school.
The early details of Bono’s career (first single and first album) are ticked off in similar fashion, but there are entertaining sidenotes, such as the story about how the band almost broke up after their first album. This is partly because some of the band members were more religious than others (a conflict summarized as being “a disciple of Jesus versus an apostle of Joey Ramone”), which allows Bono to do a very funny impression of his legendary manager Patrick McGuinness, whose reaction to this news was a deadpan, “Am I to assume some of you have been talking to God?”
Bono actually turns out to have quite a gift for impressions. His extended anecdote about Pavarotti also gets big laughs, in part because he does a note perfect version of the big man’s accent, but also because the story involves two members of the band hiding from him when he came to visit them.
The film’s most personal section lays bare Bono’s relationship with his emotionally reticent father, former opera singer Bob Hewson, whom he refers to as “The Da.” Bono frames these conversations on stage with two chairs in a pub, playing both parts as father and son barely talk to each other, Bob always opening every conversation the same way, “Anything strange or startling?” All of the detail with Bob gives an extremely strong sense of Bono effectively working through his still present psychological issues on stage, and the result is nakedly honest and deeply affecting.
To that end, the audience does a lot of reading between the lines, and Bono gives us more than enough to be able to understand what he’s not saying alongside what he is saying, freely admitting that he realized he effectively had to sing louder and louder to gain his father’s attention. At one point, Bono says – in his father’s voice – “I heard your song ‘Pride’ on the radio the other day and I might have felt some.” The way it’s delivered is casual and even offhand, without any introduction, but the fact that that line has stayed with Bono speaks volumes, despite the fact that he never explicitly states out loud his desire for his father to be proud of him.
The film’s most amusing anecdote also involves The Da, relating a moment where he met Princess Diana and was completely starstruck, having previously grumbled about being a Catholic and an anti-royalist. Laughing at the memory, Bono says, “Eight centuries of oppression, melted away in eight seconds!” almost like he still can’t believe it.
The remaining section of the film deals with Bono’s activism and his various fights against injustice, while still being painfully aware of his own privilege. As he says this, a team of make up artists touch him up on stage, one of the only moments where we see other people in the film.
The staging generally is more or less minimal – it’s just a stage with a lighting plot and a few ordinary chairs. One of the film’s nicest details is the fact that Bono rearranges all the chairs himself, most notably placing four alongside each other and then playing the part of McGuinness, bawling out the band when they were trying to quit.
If there is a complaint about the film, it’s really only that a handful of key details are missing, such as why he chose the name Bono in the first place, or some insight into his writing process. And frankly, given his unexpected gift for impressions, he should definitely have included more of them.
In short, this is an entertaining and emotionally engaging mix of music and song that will play well to both die-hard fans and newcomers alike, with Bono proving charming company throughout the film’s 87 minute running time.
