When watching or reviewing a biopic, I don’t recall spending much time wondering what the real-life subject would think of it. Would James Brown have liked *Get On Up*, the magnificent 2014 drama about his life? He probably would have found something to complain about. Elton John enthusiastically endorsed *Rocketman*, the 2019 film about him—a movie I found to be a ridiculously phony disaster.
However, while watching *Tony*—Matt Johnson’s drama about the young Anthony Bourdain and the summer he spent in Provincetown working in a restaurant kitchen for the first time—I couldn’t help but wonder what Bourdain himself would have thought of the film. How could one not? He was a man of strong opinions who had no patience for nonsense; he was a huge cinephile and the sort of person who, far from being flattered by a movie about his life, would have torn it apart for failing to capture the real story. In my view, if a biopic about Anthony Bourdain doesn’t clear the "Bourdain would have liked it" bar, it probably isn’t a good movie.
Director: Matt Johnson
Writers: Todd Bartels, Lou Howe, Matt Johnson
Stars: Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, Emilia Jones
*Tony* clears that bar. It is faithful to what Bourdain experienced in 1975, when he was a restless 19-year-old college student spending the summer in Provincetown. The film is structured as a romance and contains fictional elements, yet it remains true to the person he was and the person he was becoming: a charming, troubled guy; a middle-class kid from New Jersey running from his own demons; an aspiring writer with an extraordinary gift for words; a sweet boy, a hustler, and an asshole. *Tony* has been billed as an origin story for Anthony Bourdain—a look at how he became who he was. But one of the many things Matt Johnson—director of *BlackBerry* and *Nirvana The Band the Show the Movie*—understands is that Anthony (or Tony, as he called himself back then) was already Anthony Bourdain.
In the opening scene, he tries to impress a panel of Vassar College English professors by pitching the novel he wants to write, hoping to land a summer writing fellowship. His pitch is a rant, yet a brilliant one; you can feel the electricity of his talent—that subversive, playful urge to stir the pot. We can already hear his voice: it sounds like an intellectual, slightly eccentric bohemian—a product of the post-counterculture era—mixed with Howard Stern.
The film draws on several early chapters of *Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly*, that extraordinary 2000 memoir about his life in restaurants that turned Bourdain into an overnight celebrity. For some of us, his voice in that book was transformative: that cathartic honesty about the life he’d led, his pursuit of pleasure, appetite, and escape (to the point of becoming a functional heroin addict), and his unprecedented description of what it really means to work in a restaurant kitchen—an environment he portrayed as a frenetic, brutal workshop governed by discipline, relentless demands, and a perfectionist culinary fetishism. He made you want to be there, amidst the heat and the firing line, yet at times he also made you think: "There but for the grace of God..."
Bourdain tapped into our collective, obsessive belief that food is sacred, but he also revealed the reality of that world with cinematic flair: the charged atmosphere and the flavors, the addiction and abuse, the glory of a cold beer at midnight. Even before becoming the ultimate TV rock star among celebrity chefs, Bourdain captured the seductive rock-and-roll spirit of kitchen life; he was a hipster in a chef’s whites, capable of sizing up anyone in the room. In *Tony*, he appears far more innocent, yet the story is built upon a nuanced irony. The film revolves around Tony knowing—deep down—that he wants to be a writer, only to discover that his destiny was to be a chef. And yet... in reality, his destiny *was* to be a writer. He falls in love with working in the restaurant, but what truly captivates him isn't just the food: it’s the drama.
For me, one of the greatest pleasures of cinema is that moment when you watch an actor transform into a star. That is precisely what happens to Dominic Sessa in *Tony*. It doesn’t matter whether the film becomes an indie hit of the summer or not—though it deserves to be—; the movie proves that Sessa has the real stuff, something that wasn't quite as evident in his breakout role in *The Holdovers*, a likable but overly soft film that mimicked the style of the 70s.
Sessa imbues Tony with the kind of charisma born of rage, while also revealing the youthful confusion that sent him into a tailspin all the way to Provincetown. Back at Vassar, in a bar, he tries to hit on Nancy—played by Emilia Jones with a blend of steadfastness and shrewdness that radiates confidence. He is already half in love with her, and his mix of awkwardness and aggression makes an impression on both the audience and Nancy herself. It is uncomfortable to watch at times, yet impossible to look away. Tony is a disaster, but also a smart guy, possessing the magnetism of someone who can talk his way out of embarrassment.
After failing to secure the fellowship, he is consumed by a furious sense of grievance. He is an arrogant prick with a massive sense of entitlement, yet that very egomania is part of what will take him far. That, and his knack for making things up. A compulsive liar, he decides on a whim to head to Provincetown—where Nancy is spending the summer—essentially to stalk her. There, he tells everyone he landed the writing fellowship; for Tony, it is a matter of social status—it makes him feel like a big deal. But he has neither the fellowship nor the money. On his first night, sitting in a bar, he blows his last bit of cash on a platter of raw oysters and half a dozen beers (trying to woo the waitress by recounting how eating an oyster as a child in France changed his life—a formative anecdote straight out of the Anthony Bourdain playbook) and makes a pathetic scene because he is drunk. The owner eventually kicks him out.
The next day, however, he returns to apologize, and the owner—known simply as Chef (Antonio Banderas)—takes pity on him, giving him a job washing dishes and a place to sleep (a hammock on the back porch, where he wakes Tony up every morning by dumping a bucket of seawater on him). Back then, Provincetown wasn't the sophisticated place it is today, and Tony doesn't view working in the cramped, chaotic kitchen of a no-frills seafood joint called Flagship—with a menu of barely four dishes, most notably lobster rolls—as a stepping stone to anything.
He considers the work demeaning. The film introduces us to the eccentric characters working there, though they are never portrayed as caricatures: the disheveled, perpetually stoned Stavros (Stavros Halkias) and Sal (Leo Woodall), a womanizer so aggressive he borders on sociopathic (he tears a splinter of wood from the wall as a trophy every time he scores with a girl—something that happens often, given the hookup culture of the 70s). The film follows them to late-night house parties, but the real action unfolds in the kitchen, where they stave off hangovers with morning lines of cocaine and where Johnson captures the volatile atmosphere with an existential—and sometimes violent—spontaneity. This elevates the scenes to a level of raw, visceral realism that, in my view, *The Bear* never quite achieved.
The beauty of *Tony* lies in the fact that nothing feels predetermined. It is the story of an old-school American summer: those months when a college student like Tony—taking a job simply out of necessity—enjoys the freedom to drift and have chance encounters, embracing the unique charm of a Cape Cod coastal town in 1975. Tony wanders aimlessly, gets into fights, uses hard drugs, unsuccessfully tries to woo Nancy (who has a boyfriend at the pizzeria where she works), and slogs through the grime of dishwashing before graduating to food prep—all under the tutelage of the Chef, a taskmaster obsessed with gastronomy.
Throughout it all, Tony fails to realize that this is his true education; That is how a life-changing summer unfolds. *Tony* possesses a spirit of magical discovery that reminded me of *Adventureland*, Greg Mottola’s charming gem about working at an amusement park during the summer of ’87. Like that film, it is a nostalgic dream that vibrates with the intensity of the present moment. Yet, beyond that, *Tony* boasts the organic fluidity, humanity, and that mastery—so subtle it becomes invisible—characteristic of Richard Linklater’s cinema. You could say it is the best Linklater film that Linklater never actually made.
The Chef presides over this controlled chaos, and Antonio Banderas imbues him with a delightful blend of gentleness and unyielding authority, along with an undercurrent of mystery. Who is this man who shucks oysters as if he were preparing the Eucharist? Banderas delivers a fantastic performance, showing us how the Chef becomes a mentor to Tony by embodying everything Tony is not: someone serene, composed, wholly dedicated to the task at hand, and in tune with something greater.
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