Bono’s memoir gets a third iteration, this time on the small screen

“Writing a memoir is a whole other level of navel-gazing,” the eponymous navel gazer tells us at the top of the new Apple TV+ release “Bono: Stories of Surrender.” What, then, is a concert film of a stage show adapted from a memoir?

Pretty good is what, at least for viewers not incurably afflicted with Bono derangement syndrome. You know who you are. To U2-curious persuadables, I say unto thee that the water is warm.

Inspired, it would appear, by “Springsteen on Broadway,” the solo show the Boss wrung from his autobiography “Born to Run,” Bono booked a short tour of theaters in 2023 to translate at least some of the 576-page “Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story,” published the previous fall, to the singer’s natural habitat.

For musical accompaniment of what he gamely promoted as “tall tales of a short rock star,” the Artist Never Known as Paul Hewson considered bringing along his constant collaborator the Edge, but opted instead for a trio that would give his usual band’s familiar songs an unfamiliar sound: keyboardist (and occasional U2 producer) Jacknife Lee, cellist Kate Ellis and harpist Gemma Doherty. A few performances at New York’s 2,900-seat Beacon Theatre were filmed.

Like the book that inspired it, the film of the show opens with Bono’s account of his December 2016 cardiac surgery. “I was born with an eccentric heart,” he declares. He’s probably not intending to misquote Sia, but this kind of wordplay appeals to Bono and his father/offstage co-star Bob Hewson, given their joshing conflation of “paparazzi” and “Pavarotti” some moments later.

Indeed, while “Surrender” the book was a shamelessly name-dropping affair, Luciano Pavarotti is the only non-U2-affiliated famous person discussed at any length on-screen. Bono shares a funny anecdote about U2’s rhythm section making themselves scarce when the Italian tenor crashes a mid-1990s recording session with a camera crew in tow.

The elder Hewson, who died of cancer in 2001, is the ghost who haunts the film. Bono was 14 when his mother, Iris, suffered an aneurysm while attending her father’s funeral, dying soon after. Her widower, Bob, “expressed” his grief by never speaking of her again. Bono retroactively diagnoses his stadium-size ambitions as a plea for his distant father’s attention.

In the silent, suffocating house the Hewsons shared in violent, suffocating mid-1970s Dublin, Bono’s big brother, Norman, gave him a guitar, planting the seeds for the totemic week a couple of years later when he would meet his wife of four decades plus, Alison Stewart, and join the band that was not yet called U2. “One week in high school, and my whole life, sorted!” Bono marvels. “Sort of.”

Musically, the film is revelatory. Only a handful of tunes in U2’s 40-plus-year catalog have featured women’s vocals — though I bet you didn’t know that was Chrissie Hynde contributing to the whoa-oh-oh-ohs on “Pride (In the Name of Love).” Ellis and Doherty, in particular, lend so much revealing color to these fresh arrangements of U2 standards such as “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “Beautiful Day” that you wonder why the band hasn’t invited women to sing along more often.

This is an excerpt from a Washington Post story.