One of the many charms of “Tony,” the splendid fifth feature from the Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson, is that the film would be just as pleasurable if its subject were a complete unknown. In other words, this fictionalized origin tale of Anthony Bourdain, the celebrated chef, writer, raconteur and television host who died in 2018, asks no more of its audience than any other movie about a mouthy teenager on the rocky road to adulthood.
And that’s crucial, because Bourdain himself is almost too big for any one movie, his trials and talents too much of a mouthful to swallow in a single gulp. Wise to this, Johnson restricts us to an aperitif, a taste of a personality that’s tart and complex and sometimes self-destructive.
Informed by the early chapters of Bourdain’s 2000 memoir, “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,” Johnson (who wrote the script with Todd Bartels, Lou Howe and Matthew Miller) introduces his lanky, 19-year-old hero during one transformative summer in 1975.
After failing to win a writing fellowship he had assumed was in the bag, Tony (Dominic Sessa, fantastic) spontaneously follows his crush, Nancy (Emilia Jones), to Provincetown, Mass. Having lied to his parents (Dagmara Dominczyk and Rich Sommer) about the rejection, he has no plan; what he does have is a gargantuan ego and a ravening appetite for experiences.
Professing to be a writer, armed with ten-dollar words and a pair of nunchucks tucked in the waistband of his pants, he stalks Nancy, who is having none of his callow bravado. When the nunchucks come out and he inevitably gets rolled, he will land outside a seafood restaurant and at the feet of someone who will teach him much more than how to cook.
That restaurant, barely a half step up from a fast-food joint, is the raucous heart of “Tony,” its kitchen — like the clamorous workplace in Johnson’s 2023 gem, “BlackBerry” — a hive of controlled chaos and the crucible in which Tony will be tested. (Johnson has a real aptitude for depicting the tumultuous kinship of longtime friends and colleagues.)
The restaurant’s owner, known only as Chef (Antonio Banderas), is a rigorous yet kindhearted overseer who recognizes something potent behind Tony’s arrogant posturing, offering him a hammock on his porch in exchange for washing dishes. And the beauty of Banderas’s quietly affecting performance lies in how he conveys Chef’s gradual realization that his tutelage of Tony has awakened long-abandoned dreams of his own.
But if Chef is the angel on Tony’s shoulder, the devil on the other is Sal (a brilliant Leo Woodall), a skirt-chasing, line-snorting hedonist and a freewheeling guide to the town’s nightlife and mood-altering substances. This tension, more than any romance, drives the film’s drama, the screenplay repeatedly raising the choice between discipline and recklessness. Toiling miserably alongside Sal and his fellow cooks (boisterously played by Stavros Halkias and Michael Jibrin), Tony is finally learning something that he is good at; he’s just too wasted to know it yet.
Since his feature debut in 2013, Johnson has emerged as something of a chronicler of troubled masculinity, his characters restless searchers with grand ideas who may be their own worst enemies. “Tony” fits the template; like its namesake, the movie is raw and earnest, sulky and swaggering. And occasionally poetic.
“I want you to take my photo because I like the way I feel when you look at me,” Tony tells Nancy, requesting a portrait for a book he has yet to write. At rare moments like this, Sessa casts off the charisma of alienation to reveal the vulnerability that would temper Bourdain’s brash hyper-confidence.
Using vintage lenses and shooting mainly on Cape Cod, the cinematographer Michael Bauman lends a nostalgic, almost sentimental sheen to his beachy locations. The story is slight, but by concentrating on this crucial sliver of a teeming life, Johnson gets at something deeper and more universal than a wider focus might have allowed. In the end, this captivating movie may be less about the birth of a chef than about the making of a man.
Tony Rated R for a hint of heroin, a skinful of booze and a ton of sulking. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters.
The post ‘Tony’ Review: An Appetite for Experiences appeared first on New York Times.
