Tony follows a very familiar sort of 19-year-old menace—the kind of character coming-of-age movies like this were made for. He’s someone you might have crushed on in college: He sulks around with worldly paperbacks stuffed into his rear pockets, dresses in leather jackets even if it’s unseasonably warm, and seems to wear a permanent glower. Yet Tony, as played by Dominic Sessa, is more than just a pretentious bad boy; he’s starting to work his way toward something meaningful. His full name also just so happens to be Anthony Bourdain, who the audience likely knows will one day become a renowned chef and author, tapping his back-of-house experiences for material; eventually, his celebrity as a TV personality will transcend his punchy writing about the life of a cook.
The film, directed and co-written by Matt Johnson, should be hamstrung by this conclusion. On paper, Tony sounds like it requires the audience to understand something that doesn’t happen during the movie; it saves calling Tony by his full name until its final moments. This often irritating, barely grown dilettante will become someone important when he does a little more maturing, off-screen. The truth about Bourdain, however, is that he really was a cinematic figure, even in his wayward adolescence—at least if his evocative writing on that period is to be believed.
Tony draws from Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain’s 2000 best seller that laid bare the rough-and-tumble world of haute cuisine from the perspective of a jaded yet passionate New York chef. But the screenplay adapts only the early chapters, which cover Bourdain’s tentative beginnings in the cooking profession, including one teenage summer he spent, frequently hungover, working in the kitchen of a seafood restaurant on Cape Cod. Presenting that appetizer as a rich, earthy main course somehow comes together beautifully. Tony is not burdened by the complex details of Bourdain’s adult life, and Sessa is not asked to imitate a well-known man who spent the latter half of his career on TV. Instead, he just has to capture the feeling of possibility, wrapped up in the recognizable foolishness of youth. He and Johnson both do a beautiful job of it.
[Read: The missing pieces of Anthony Bourdain]
The viewer meets Tony at Vassar College, where he spent two years before dropping out. The school year is over, and he’s hoping to gain a summer writing fellowship that will impress his ditzy dad, Pierre (played by Rich Sommer), and his far more judgmental mother, Gladys (Dagmara Domińczyk). When that falls through, Tony instead follows a crush named Nancy (Emilia Jones) to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she has a summer job; he eventually stumbles into a gig washing dishes at the Flagship, a seafood spot. The staff is made up of the hard-partying guys one might expect (including a garrulous Stavros Halkias and a brooding Leo Woodall). For much of the run time, Tony is an observer, sucking up what knowledge he can while trying to project a precious aloofness—a trait that beguiles many a young man in search of inspiration.
His muse is found, primarily, in a character simply called “Chef” (Antonio Banderas). He’s a wise, older Brazilian man who silently greets the ocean every morning and still loves his trade enough to make his own ketchup rather than buy bottles of Heinz. Banderas could play this role in his sleep: the meditative, somewhat elusive mentor, delivering advice with simultaneous bluntness and poeticism. But he might actually be the best actor alive who could inhabit that sort of sensei role without it feeling clichéd and off-the-rack. Chef exists mostly to invest Tony with a sense of pride in what he does, even if it’s the manual labor of cooking rather than whatever intellectual pursuits Tony thinks he should follow. Johnson understands that this respect for artistry was what made Bourdain such an enduring figure.
That inherent empathy is how Tony gets away with being a biopic that ends in the early chapters of a person’s life. It’s an origin story for how a man became a chef, yes, yet it’s more concerned with how someone might fall in love with a scrappy culture and the beautiful way that cuisine blends the highbrow and the low. Tony is learning how to create shellfish delicacies; at the same time, he’s cracking open oysters and cleaning plates. (He’s also holding his own among seedy, profane company, the kind of ribald back-and-forth that Johnson can present with hilarious immediacy—be it in his prior biopic, BlackBerry, or in the riotous Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.) Although Tony is a necessarily minor piece of storytelling, it feels deceptively major nevertheless—and is infused with just enough of its subject’s real-world charisma.
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