Leave it to Bono to turn a book tour into something as extravagant as “Bono: Stories of Surrender,” the Apple TV+ movie that had its world premiere on Friday night at the Cannes Film Festival.
The U2 singer has never been one for half-measures or modesty, and his version of the book tour for his 2022 autobiography “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story” was a dramatic, theatrical presentation that mixed memory and music to provide snapshots from his life, from a child in Dublin to an international rock star. Presented on a small number of stages around the world, most notably during a 10-night stand in New York’s Beacon Theatre, it was no book reading or stripped down “Springsteen on Broadway”-style presentation, but a sensory delight as theatrical in its own way as U2’s own performances.
And “Bono: Stories of Surrender” takes the Beacon shows as a launching pad – but with the help of director Andrew Dominik, it goes far beyond that stage to mix in new material shot offstage and backstage. It’s bombastic, extravagant and melodramatic at times – but I don’t use those words as pejoratives, because in the hands of Bono and Dominik, it’s also pretty glorious, a mashup of Bono’s life and U2’s music that refuses to be contained by the usual boundaries of an author’s tour or a one-man show.
And that’s just the regular version of “Stories of Surrender” that premiered in Cannes’ Grand Theatre Lumière and will move to Apple TV+ on May 30. There is another version for the Apple Vision Pro headset platform, an Apple Immersive Video remix, if you will, that adds additional animation and footage from special cameras that essentially puts the viewer onstage with Bono or hovering above the audience with a 180-degree perspective.
Like the book, “Stories of Surrender” begins with Bono’s description of the open-heart surgery he underwent in 2016 to repair a life-threatening “blister” on his aorta. “I was born with an eccentric heart,” he begins, but he also points out not just the blister but also the bluster that helped make him famous: He has enormous lung capacity, he says, with the doctors diagnosing him at 130% of normal lung capacity for a man his age as he lay in the operating room.
So that’s our subject, our master of ceremonies and our storyteller: a guy with an eccentric heart and a lot of air. Both of those things come to the forefront in this collaboration with Dominik, the “Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” director who has made a couple of essential music films with Nick Cave in “One More Time With Feeling” and “This Much I Know to Be True.”
The cinematography of “Stories of Surrender” is lustrous black and white and the set is a stark and brilliantly lit space with a few pieces of furniture: a plain wooden table on which Bono occasionally, plus three chairs that remain empty to represent his missing bandmates The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. Their absence is a central fact of the show, which he describes not as a one-man show, but a “quarter-man show.”
(That said, the simplicity goes out the window in the last few minutes when the film suddenly shifts into color and moves to a 288-year-old opera house in Naples, because it’s thematically appropriate and because Bono wanted it.)
There are also ghosts on that stage, most notably those of his mother, who died from an aneurysm when Bono was 14, and his father, a would-be opera singer with a powerful tenor voice who could rarely bring himself to praise his son’s own vocal accomplishments.
This is not a straight concert movie, although Bono does a lot of singing. The film contains more than a dozen songs, both the hits (“Vertigo,” “City of Blinding Lights,” “With or Without You,” “It’s a Beautiful Day”) and the deep cuts (“Stories for Boys,” “Iris”), all of which are reconfigured by and for the Jacknife Lee Trio, which consists of violin, harp and keyboards. The songs are placed in a different sonic space than the originals — and for the most part, these dramatic reinventions are more successful than the stripped-down versions on U2’s recent “Songs of Surrender” album.
The variety of material that Dominik draws from also allows the film to augment and rework the performances. Instead of singing “Iris,” a song to his mother, Bono recites it while the female members of the trio sing behind him; it’s a particularly beautiful and haunting take on the song, perhaps matched only by “With or Without You,” which takes advantage of the multi media-trickery to allow Bono to talk about his wife, Alison Stewart, between each line he sings.
Another key to the film is the way U2’s music is used as punctuation, with reconfigured motifs sneaking into the background of his stories. Edge’s guitar line from “Sunday Bloody Sunday” is given to the harp in one moment, while some formless music resolves itself into the magnificent opening of “Where the Streets Have No Name” in another.
Through it all, Bono grapples with his upbringing, his relationship with his father — whom he depicts in several recreated pub conversations in which the son plays both parts — and his relationship with his band, his fame and his ego.
There are a lot of people in these stories who puncture that ego: his ma, who told the headmaster at his school that her boy would have no interest in singing in the choir; his da, who derisively labeled his son “a baritone who thinks he’s a tenor”; his bandmates, without whom their singer couldn’t begin to realize his grandiose visions; and especially his wife Ali, who saw through him from the moment they met as teenagers.
But Bono himself has always been more prone to puncture his own ego than his detractors will admit. “It is preposterous to think that others might be as interested in your own stories as you are,” he says at the beginning of the film. And maybe that’s true, but his openhearted embrace of the preposterous has always been one of the endearing things about the guy to his supporters, albeit one of the annoying things to his detractors.
So no, “Songs of Surrender” won’t be the film to persuade those for whom a little messianic zeal goes a long way. But for those of us who don’t mind a little of that zeal, particularly when it’s thrown in a rock ‘n’ roll blender with a bit of soul searching, some stylishly twisted music and dazzling visuals, it’s hard not to surrender, and hard not to be almost as interested in Bono’s stories as he is.
The post ‘Bono: Stories of Surrender’ Review: U2 Frontman’s Life Story Is Grand and Bombastic, the Way We Like It appeared first on TheWrap.