‘Bono: Stories Of Surrender’ review: U2’s Bono looks back in energetic solo show

Dir: Andrew Dominik. US/Italy/Eire. 2025. 87mins

To mark the 2022 publication of his memoir ’Give up: 40 Songs’ , U2 frontman Bono launched into a one-man tour of intimate gigs all through the US and Europe. Described as ‘a night of phrases, music and a few mischief’, the present noticed the then 62-year-old Bono inter-lacing often-theatrical narration with snippets from his U2 again catalogue to inform his personal story. In 2023, the star teamed up with director Andrew Dominik to recreate, and reimagine, that present in New York’s historic Beacon Theatre, and the result’s an intense baring of the soul that’s half efficiency, half confessional and all leisure.

 Half efficiency, half confessional and all leisure

Streaming on Apple TV+ from Might 30 following its premiere as a Cannes Particular Screening, Tales Of Give up will probably be catnip for Bono/U2 followers. Though they could miss the presence of different U2 members (The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr), Bono performs with cellist Kate Ellis, harpist Gemma Doherty and U2 producer Jacknife Lee to breathe contemporary life into hits like ’Sunday Bloody Sunday’, ’Vertigo’ and ‘Stunning Day’. Notably, that is the primary function to be shot in Apple Immersive Video for the Apple Imaginative and prescient Professional.

“Writing a memoir is a complete different stage of navel gazing,” Bono admits early on and, at first, it appears as if this can be simply one other train in such. Shot in stark black-and-white, on a minimal stage, the movie begins with Bono energetically recreating his life-threatening 2016 coronary heart surgical procedure. It’s a bravura opening, an completed showman effortlessly turning emotion into leisure for the assembled, adoring throng. However then, as he makes use of this as leaping off level to mirror on his life and near-50-year profession, the artifice begins to crack.

Co-writing the present with Invoice Flanagan, and dividing it into chapters, Bono speaks candidly on a wide range of subjects, starting from his dad and mom and Irish roots to his spouse and youngsters and his stratospheric music profession. Whereas the topics is probably not significantly shocking, Bono’s telling of pivotal moments in his life is actually arresting. Weaving recollection, recreation, drama and track, he takes the viewers from the schoolboy Paul David Hewson to the Grammy Award-winning, stadium-filling rock star he’s in the present day. Significantly poignant are moments through which he talks concerning the dying of his mom Iris, when he was simply 14, and his re-enactment of conversations he had along with his hard-to-please father, wannabe musician Brendan Hewson.

Dominck has already made two considerate rock documentaries with Nick Cave, One Extra Time With Feeling (2016) and This A lot I Know To Be True in 2022, and he has a kinship with the artwork, whereas he’s additionally well-known for kinetic drama together with Blonde, additionally in 2022.  The setting right here could also be extra contained, however the power is excessive. Taking pictures in black and white – other than a cathartic closing second in full color – DoP Erik Messerschmidt (Mank, Ferrari, The Killer) alternates between intimate close-ups, high-angle huge pictures and swooping, immersive camerawork. Enhancing, from Lasse Jarvi, is equally as pacey.

But the quieter moments, a few of which see Bono present extra, direct-to-camera narration, are the best, as he muses on his non secular religion, his philanthropic motivations, his personal fatherhood, his place of privilege. This ‘Give up’ mission is, Bono admits, an try and solid off the masks of fame and reveal his true self. Whereas many might query whether or not doing that in entrance of an viewers dilutes the sense of real revelation, there is no such thing as a denying Bono’s frankness, honesty and humour – and that he stays one hell of a raconteur.