However you feel about Bono before seeing this slick, souped-up ‘audience with’ doc will probably be reinforced by the time the credits roll. If you love him, the doc will brighten his messianic glow. If you loathe him, you’ll easily find reasons to throw tomatoes. If you couldn’t care less about the pint-sized Irish rocker and activist, it’s hard to imagine why you’d be watching it in the first place.
Whether it’s Bono’s enormous success or his attempts to make a difference in the world (or most likely a mix of the two), Bono inspires strong reactions, and you can feel him here trying to bring the whole enterprise of his life a little closer to Earth. He called on Andrew Dominik (Killing Them Softly) to film his one-man show at New York’s Beacon Theater in 2023, perhaps attracted by the New Zealand filmmaker’s work with Nick Cave. It’s a performance that’s self-consciously stripped back, with just a few chairs and a table on stage, with Bono recounting stories of his childhood, mother, father, wife and band mates and regularly breaking into song, with renditions here of hits including ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and ‘Pride (In the Name of Love)’. Dominik layers on a silvery black-and-white glamour, delivering a multi-angle magic act that lends a constant sense of movement and energy to the film.
This good-natured hagiography isn’t anywhere near free of pomposity
The most endearing and interesting stretches of the film feature Bono discussing his parents. His mother Iris died when he was a young teen after collapsing at her own father’s funeral, and her name was barely spoken again by his father Brendan. Here, Bono regrets his own role in ‘disappearing’ her memory. He recalls his opera-loving father’s envy of him as he became successful and also his quiet pride, but he regrets that he was only able to see him as a friend after his death from cancer in 2001.
Bono treads lightly on his humanitarian work. He doesn’t avoid it entirely and jokes that ‘hypocrites get a bad rap’, the message being that at least he’s given it a shot. There might be mentions of Pavarotti and Princess Di but the name-dropping is kept to a minimum and if there were any mentions of popes or Nelson Mandela, I missed them. This good-natured hagiography isn’t anywhere near free of pomposity, but even Bono seems to know when it’s best just to keep quiet and move on.
Bono: Stories of Surrender premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. It streams on Apple TV+ from May 30.