U2 singer Bono lays his life bare in one-man stage show Stories of Surrender

"All this saving the world, is it really service, duty, righteous anger, or is it just a childlike desire to be at the centre of the action?" Bono wonders backstage at his sold-out, one-man show at New York's Beacon Theater in 2023.

"Desire and virtue is a whole dance."

Across a 45-year career as a globe-straddling superstar and activist, the U2 singer has danced the fine line between rock 'n' roll icon and enduring public nuisance. He's been both the voice of one of the biggest bands of the late 20th-century and — to some, at least — a blowhard palling around with celebrities and world leaders.

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But as the new movie Bono: Stories of Surrender shows, there's a complicated, endearingly contradictory man behind the often-outsized public profile; one whose idealism is frequently troubled by self-doubt, and whose pursuit of stardom stems from a past steeped in loss.

Filmed over several nights of his New York residency, Stories of Surrender vividly captures Bono's one-man adaptation of his best-selling 2022 memoir, Surrender, translating the book's revealing candour to the stage with the singer's typically self-reflexive humour.

As he quipped to Jimmy Kimmel recently: "I play an aging rock star on a massive ego trip."

There are no mirror-balls or giant lemons or jumbotrons broadcasting prank calls to The White House, just a starkly lit stage and a few empty pieces of furniture to stand in for key figures in his life — including the rest of U2, who are nowhere to be found.

It begins, as many such stories do, with a health scare that prompts a crisis of faith and life evaluation. "How did I get here?" Bono asks, echoing the words of his contemporary David Byrne, after an operation on his "eccentric" heart in 2016.

Still, it's hardly a sombre opening: the star is in full-tilt carnival-barker mode, part preacher, part game-show host, a pair of wraparound shades short of his Zoo TV MacPhisto.

Bono's brand of ironic bravado, in which every sincere moment is inevitably chased by a self-deprecating shot, will do little to convince detractors who regard him as the epitome of anti-cool.

For U2 fans, however, it's a wonderful reminder of just how adept he is with a pithy turn of phrase or ready-made pop graffiti — he's perhaps the only songwriter to land the line "you're turning tricks with your crucifix" on a major motion picture soundtrack aimed at children.

Much of Bono's humour appears to originate from his late father, Bob Hewson, a man who looms over the show despite appearing only as an empty chair and a glass of Black Bush whiskey.

Playing both father and son, Bono recreates infrequent pub meetings with his Da, who remains hilariously unimpressed with his kid's success (labelling him "a baritone who thinks he's a tenor"), nor his phone calls from Pavarotti (Bono's impression of the Italian opera giant is among the film's funniest moments).

Their relationship was complex. After a 14-year-old Bono lost his mother, who collapsed at his grandfather's funeral ("It sounds almost too Irish, I know," he jokes), his father never spoke of her again. Her death haunted almost every aspect of the rocker's life and career.

At the very same time, he would meet his future wife, Ali, and the musicians — The Edge, Larry Mullen Jr, and Adam Clayton — with whom he'd rocket to mulleted '80s stardom.

The stories of U2's early adventures are invariably charming, as the teenage band fumbles about to land on their signature sound — at one point Bono urging The Edge to make his guitar "sound like an electric drill into the ear".

It's Bono's reckoning with fame that proves to be the real revelation, however, as he and his band mates wrestle with their spiritual beliefs in the wake of new-found celebrity.

"Fame is currency," Bono reasons. "You wouldn't need charity if the world was just, so — get the cheque."

If the humanitarian act borders on Vegas schtick, Bono is the first to admit it.

"I am an over-paid, over-regarded, over-rewarded, over-fed rock 'n' roll star," he says in voiceover, commenting on the action.

And whenever the self-therapy pauses for a burst of music, it's hard to resist those soaring pipes, still stirring after all these years and audible wear and tear.

'With Or Without You', delivered here in thorny tribute to his wife, remains as sad and gorgeous as ever, while 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' takes on a new, ghostly power in a stripped back, slowed down performance.

Meanwhile, U2's 1988 hit 'Desire' emerges as both a pivotal point in the band's career and a key text in Bono's life, tapping into the tension between the sacred and the profane that the band would toy with on '90s highlights Achtung Baby and Zooropa.

"For love or money, money, money," Bono sings, throwing theatrical shapes and channelling late-period Elvis.

Even 'Beautiful Day' — arguably the beginning of U2's long decline into musical irrelevance — becomes a moving elegy for the dead, as Bono teases out the melancholy beneath the song's radio-friendly chorus.

It's a lovely moment, a tribute to those we've lost and to all the strange little things that somehow keep us going along the way.

Haters will burn with renewed fire, but if you've ever had a soft spot for U2, Stories of Surrender may just make you fall in love with them all over again.