REVIEW: Bono: Stories of Surrender [2025]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 86 minutes
Release Date: May 30th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Apple TV+
Director(s): Andrew Dominik

These are the tall tales of a short rockstar.

Bono is one helluva showman … I say as if the world didn’t already know. I knew nothing about Andrew Dominik’s film based upon the U2 frontman’s one-man stage show “Stories of Surrender: An Evening of Words, Music and Some Mischief…” (written by Bill Flanagan and directed by Willie Williams), nor the memoir Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story it was in turn based upon for the purposes of self-promotion. I won’t say I had any interest in watching it once I found out about those things either. But, man, if it didn’t end up being an enthralling piece of performance art.

I wouldn’t say I’m a U2 fan insofar as following their music, but I do absolutely love many of their radio singles and will sometimes take their greatest hits cd for a spin. It was therefore Dominik’s name that actually piqued my interest—as well as Bono: Stories of Surrender releasing straight to AppleTV+ considering the fiasco that was Songs of Innocence suddenly appearing in every iTunes account free of charge on September 9th, 2014. I figured I would enjoy the music if nothing else and hoped the event would at least look pretty on-screen in the process. I didn’t expect the finished work to become a separate entity all its own.

Because this isn’t a concert film. Yes, most of it frames Bono on a bare stage (save for some tables and chairs to use with spotlights implying characters within his stories while a giant LED screen flashes programmed patterns and shapes behind) as he performs (complete with flubs and ad-libbed responses to audience reactions), but there’s also overlaid text, juxtaposed alternate dialogue (presumably taken from a confessional revealed in the third act), and gorgeously constructed compositions by Oscar-winner Erik Messerschmidt that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn were done without an audience and simply spliced in. Dominik also fades moments in and out to excise the dead air of applause and prop set-ups, even speeding one section up for extra flair. That’s why it’s “based on” the show rather than simply being “the show.”

It’s at once a beautiful, kinetic picture book of black and white rockstar prowess and a stripped down, self-deprecating and vulnerable account of a life. Every snippet of songs played reverberates around the theater to mimic the arena bombast they’re used to while these new arrangements (by Jacknife Lee, with Kate Ellis and Gemma Doherty’s accompaniment) render their emotive essence wholly unique to the space of NYC’s Beacon Theatre. And the anecdotes are perfectly measured for dramatic impact as each one builds to either a laugh-out-loud punch line or sobering gut-punch of a revelation to leave us in silence.

There’s just enough to show why the show was a good way to market the book (the implicit “buy it to find out more” schtick) and why a filmed version proved a worthwhile endeavor to stand on its own. The insight into the band is fun. Bono’s fight for justice and world peace is presented with transparency both in its capacity to inspire and its proliferation being born out of the privilege to afford it. And the tales pitting him against his “da” Bob Hewson are the unequivocal highlight—turning Bono’s monologues into a conversation with himself to reconcile who he is against who his father was.

So, while I wouldn’t begrudge you for dismissing Stories of Surrender as a vanity project, doing so will inevitably prove you never allowed yourself to fully engage with what the show was doing despite that veneer. Because whatever its origins or optics, the resulting emotional resonance hits hard.