U2’s Bono is seen as a successor to a very small fraternity of world-conquering rock stars – the likes of Springsteen, Jagger and Bowie. He’s less recognized as a successor to a literary tradition: the Irish pantheon of Joyce, Yeats, Beckett, Heaney, and O’Brien.
But his impressive gift of language shines in the new documentary Bono: Stories of Surrender, directed by Andrew Dominik, which just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in the Special Screenings section.
I was born with an eccentric heart,” he notes wryly near the beginning of the film – an iteration of his one-man show at New York’s Beacon Theatre, which in turn grew out of his 2022 memoir, Bono: 40 Songs, One Story. The lovely “eccentric heart” line gestures to an inherited condition that would almost cost him his life: He underwent emergency aortic valve-replacement surgery in 2016. That near-death experience in his mid-50s seems to have triggered a reckoning with his life and relationships, especially with his late father, Brendan Robert “Bob” Hewson.
