I’d love to see Mick Jagger do a one-man show, looking back over his life with the Rolling Stones and his private life without them. Jagger has always been a witty and observant raconteur, and he must have a zillion stories that could singe our eyebrows. Bruce Springsteen’s one-man show, “Springsteen on Broadway,” which opened in 2017, was often bracing, because Springsteen seized the chance to present sides of himself that undercut his image — like the fact that after all his turmoil-of-the-working-man rock ‘n’ roll songs, he is someone who had never even set foot in a factory.
But in “Bono: Stories of Surrender,” the handsomely shot black-and-white film that’s been made of the U2 frontman’s 2022 solo stage show, we watch as Bono tells the story of his life and takes us inside his ambition, his passion, his celebrity, his charity, and his family demons (he’s got one of those fathers you wrestle with for your entire life, even after he’s gone). And while the show is honest and engaging, full of confessions and music and inside-the-band anecdotes and other savory tidbits, it all goes down almost a bit too smoothly, without quite hitting you with the force of revelation, since Bono has always had the loquacious talk-show-friendly slightly oversharing quality of an open book.
Which is not to say that he has always been one. Bono is as cagey as any rock star, and when you cast your eye over the last four decades of his artistry and fame, you see, in many ways, a quintessential illustration of rock-star image management, which this show, in more ways than not, is an extension of. The show was originally conceived as a way to present and publicize Bono’s memoir, “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” which was published in November 2022. It was that very month, at the Beacon Theatre in New York, when Bono first presented the show as a free-form autobiographical trip of sound and image and vibrant recollection.
The film version, which premiered at Cannes tonight, was directed by Andrew Dominik (“Blonde”), who has made two documentaries about Nick Cave, and who clearly has an affinity for rock stars who strike the perfect note of postpunk mystique combined with a certain reverence for the call of tradition. Ever since Jonathan Demme made his 1987 Spalding Gray film, “Swimming to Cambodia,” it’s been clear that it’s possible for a movie director to take something as spare and elemental as a one-man stage show and make something decorous and cinematic out of it. And that’s just what Dominik, who’s a visual wizard, does with “Stories of Surrender.” The images often frame Bono in shadow, with glints of light around him, lending a chiaroscuro elegance to his presence. And the heady combination of camera angles and editing help to turn that stage into a stylized zone of memory, even as Bono takes pains to defuse any hint of self-seriousness, declaring at the outset that writing a memoir involves “a whole other level of naval-gazing.”
Then again, this is Bono we’re talking about it. A certain self-seriousness runs in his black Irish veins. At the starts of the show, he cuts right to his “All That Jazz” moment — the sudden diagnosis of a heart-valve problem that could have killed him. So this is going to be a show about figuring out what matters, and learning to value what you might have taken for granted. At the same time, Bono really is every inch a showman, and he infuses the saga of his formative days with U2, and their rise in the world, with an electricity that’s uncanny to behold. He’s a great storyteller, and though the three other band members — Larry Mullen, Adam Clayton Jr., and The Edge — are simply represented by chairs he arranges on the stage, they come alive as characters. Bono, born Paul Hewson, attributes his own obsession with becoming a rock star to the fact that his father essentially ignored him, a situation that was only exacerbated when his mother died, quite suddenly, of an aneurysm, a tragedy his father literally never spoke of. (He would not say her name.)
Bono was just 14, and within two years he had hooked up with three of his classmates at the Mount Temple Comprehensive School to form a band. That they literally joined forces the same week Bono met the girl who would become his wife, Ali Stewart (they married in 1982), is some kind of karma. Bono’s gods were the Ramones, whose songs were so simple they showed you it could be done. And Bono tells a story that gives you chills, about how at a rehearsal he brandished a single by Public Image Ltd, trying to get the other members of U2 to declare the newness of who they were, and he then grabbed The Edge’s guitar and started tossing off some intense notes, and The Edge took his guitar back and started to rattle out a wall of caterwauling sound, and this cacophony became “I Will Follow,” which became the band’s first single, launching their sonic and spiritual identity. The lyrics, by Bono, were a tribute to his late mother, Iris, who haunted his imagination with the same tragic power that John Lennon’s mother, Julia (who died when he was 17), haunted him.
There are several musicians onstage with Bono — Kate Ellis, playing the cello; Gemma Doherty, on keyboards and vocals; and the Irish music producer and mixer Jacknife Lee, on keyboards and percussion — and what we hear throughout the show are elegant unplugged versions of U2’s songs that work less as full-scale performance than as stripped-down allusions to the songs. They work as theater. Yet it must be said: When you literally take The Edge out of these songs, you kind of take the edge off them.
The story of U2, their rise and their reign, has been widely covered before, in articles and books and several landmark documentaries (including one staggeringly great one, Davis Guggenheim’s “From the Sky Down,” about the making of “Achtung Baby”). And once the band is established, the chronicle of everything that’s gone on among them stops being the nexus of the show. What comes more to the center is Bono’s relationship with his father — the way that they would have a drink, once a week, at the same pub and just sit there without saying anything, his father kicking things off by asking the ritual question: “So, anything strange or startling?” When Bono talks about trying to impress his da with the fact that Luciano Pavarotti, “the greatest singer in the world,” sought out U2 to collaborate with them, you hear an echo of how much he’s still trying to prove himself to the old man. And the journey Bono goes through to do that, and to let go of it, is fierce and unguarded and moving. You see that Bono is someone who, in his struggle to accept the woefully flawed nature of his father’s love, attained a full self-knowledge.
But there’s one key place in the show, I would say, where Bono doesn’t know himself as well as he thinks. He confronts the issue that many have raised about him, concerning the public face of his activism and philanthropy — the whole image he has cultivated as a kind of savior of the downtrodden. He himself raises the key question: Is he an overprivileged rock star, with all the perks and trappings that come with it, playing the part of a saint who is doing unto others? He admits that he is. He owns his own “hypocrisy.” But then he dismisses it, basically saying: So what? What matters, he says, isn’t motives but results. In the end, says Bono, who cares if he’s a hypocrite? By raising millions of dollars for causes like starvation in Africa, he’s doing what he can. His own hypocrisy needn’t be so central.
But here, in fact, is the problem with that. Bono has done a tremendous amount of good work. No one needs to beat up on him because he’s also a rich and pampered rock star. But the argument against this brand of philanthropy is that someone like Bono, by elevating “caring” into a kind of performative action, helped to change the very definition of what it means to care. When doing good for others becomes a projection of your own image, it turns the entire culture into something performative. It waters down the meaning of compassion. And when that happens, it’s not just “motives” that get messed up. So do results. Watching “Songs of Surrender,” you come away knowing a great deal about Bono, feeling like you’ve touched his soul a bit, and that’s mostly a captivating journey. But you’re never convinced that he’s on a mission larger than the song of himself.
