CANNES – In the opening moments of “Bono: Stories of Surrender,” filmmaker Andrew Dominik’s black and white concert film about the man, his music, his one-man stage show, and his life up until now, there is an acknowledgement from the titular artist that he knows talking about himself as he did in his memoir as well as now this show that draws from it is the epitome of “navel gazing.” This brief movement exists, not without self-aware humor, to establish how what you are about to watch is more than a little self-centered. It’s playful and earnest, like much of the 2023 show at New York City’s Beacon Theater that we then get immersed in, telegraphing that he is going to indulge in a bit of this navel gazing. 
For fans of Bono, they likely won’t care and will eat up every second of the experience. For everyone else, the opening proclamation intended as a cover of sorts for the film will only be one of the few moments that start to leave beyond the mythology of the artist to get into who he is as a man. As the singer takes us through his greatest hits while offering his reflections on what informed some of them and what was going on in his life at the time, the showman is able to tell a frequently good yarn even while feeling like he’s always keeping things tightly controlled. 
‘La Ola’ Review: Sebastián Lelio’s Audacious Fourth Wall-Breaking Musical Mostly Hits All the Right Notes [Cannes]
He knows how to set up a serviceable punchline and when to just let the music speak for itself, though rarely does he bare his soul. After all, he’s spent a career entertaining and the way he talks about why he was drawn to this is quite interesting, though he still knows how to put forth a specific image. It’s frequently refreshing to hear him say how it is that he was drawn to fame as a way to fill the holes in his heart, something which is both a metaphor and a more literal reality surrounding some medical troubles that he had. It just never amounts to being much more than that. 
What becomes even more disappointing is that Dominik as a director is not able to move beyond this as one would hope in terms of how he directs the film. Where something like Spike Lee’s “American Utopia” was both exhilarating and joyous, capturing the collaborative wonder of seeing a concert come to life, “Bono: Stories of Surrender” feels oddly narrow. After acknowledging who he is performing with, the singer mostly dominates the spotlight and rarely engages with the talented band that is largely kept to the shadows behind him. While this is largely due to the film having different goals than Lee did, which is to ostensibly hear Bono reveal more about himself than he typically would, Dominik’s approach doesn’t do much in the way of deconstructing the man or his ego either. For every potentially striking visual we get off the bright lights flashing over the stage, it’s always to primarily illuminate the man who remains forever at the center, yet still oddly opaque to us. 
When the film then becomes about Bono discussing his family, there are moving reflections that he offers about loss that make one wish we’d had a chance to sit with them for a bit longer rather than just undercut them with a joke. Perhaps this is itself revealing about the way he copes and how he can’t always be vulnerable, though that requires looking for something deeper than the film itself ever is. Bono remains a talented singer, but all the bigger ideas that he tries to engage with don’t ever get their due. He does demonstrate a greater self-awareness about his role as a wealthy man using charity to try to fix what are fundamentally unjust realities, even broadly acknowledging how some have criticized his motivations. However, he then just says that these motives don’t matter and that it’s the outcomes that do. While broadly true, the reason that people are concerned with motives is that it can impact the outcomes. 
READ MORE: Cannes 2025 Most Anticipated Films: ‘Sentimental Value,’ ‘Eddington,’ ‘Die My Love’
Even as it was never going to be some sort of treatise on the state of the world and how to fix it, it’s these moments where it becomes clear that the film is uninterested in touching on anything deeper that Bono himself doesn’t seem to particularly want to. It’s not the most superficial of celebrity documentaries and with some more genuinely intriguing insights that it finds in key moments, but “Bono: Stories of Surrender” is never interesting in breaking any new ground. Despite its title, it’s unable or unwilling to surrender itself to being more than just another celebrity documentary. [C]
“Bono: Stories of Surrender” will be available to stream on Apple TV+ starting May 30.
Follow along for all our coverage of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, including previews, reviews, interviews, and more.