3/10
Those fearing - or hoping for - a film that is a character assassination on the lead singer of U2 can rest easy (or groan with disappointment). Bono emerges from the film with his reputation intact, but unfortunately the same cannot be said of the film itself.
Given that the film was made with Bono's cooperation, this is no great surprise, and maybe the film makers thought that attaching his name to the project would be enough to make viewers overlook the fact that a very small story has been transmuted into a two hour film which is at least half an hour too long.
Back to basics. Neil McCormick and his brother Ivan were at school in Dublin in 1978. A friend of theirs at school called Paul Hewson started a band called The Hype at the same time as Neil and Ivan set out on the road to rock and roll glory. Hewson liked the sound of Ivan's guitar playing and asked Neil if his brother could join them. Neil said no, without telling Ivan, and the rest is history, since Hewson and co became Bono and U2, while Neil McCormick is the rock critic for the Daily Telegraph, and Ivan never did become rich and famous. McCormick wrote about this in his memoir, I Was Bono's Doppelganger, which is amusing enough about his struggles to make it as a rock star. But it doesn't contain the requisite amount of fake melodrama which the scriptwriters decided was essential, so the poor wee bairn of a story has had had massive steroid injections of tension, conflict, failure and misunderstanding, and is a lot less appealing than the original material.
I didn't believe a word of the whole thing, from start to finish. I'm not saying it's all fictional (though I expect a good deal is), simply that the combination of a poor script, an unappealing hero, a less-than-charismatic actor, and a director who only operates at 11 (to reference a vastly superior film about being a rock star) produces a film of so little interest that it might as well never have been made. The potential ingredients are there, but they never result in anything coherent or plausible. We're meant to be fascinated and amused by the painful lack of progress made by the McCormick boys as they swirl in the exhaust fumes of U2's glory, even while Bono is forever reaching out a helping hand to his old schoolmates. But Neil the knob is so determined to do things his way that he lurches from one disaster to another, with his brother the main victim of his incompetence. But we just don't care about any of them. They're a pair of posy nitwits with no discernible talent, except for failure.
Throw into this mix an Irish criminal providing financial backing, a love interest for Neil that fails to ignite, a series of slightly creepy appearance from a Bono lookalike, an oddball man from a recording company and a whole series of set pieces that fall flat on their face, and all you're left with is Pete Postlethwaite stealing the few scenes he's in (for his last screen appearance) as the brothers' gay landlord who tries to help them on their way to stardom. Given that there are already a handful of films about rock music - Spinal Tap, The Commitments - which set the bar very high for this particular genre, then I can't see this one appealing to anyone. I'd love to put in a good word for it - I am, after all, a huge fan of U2 (truly) - but the only word I can come up with is 'avoid'.
