REVIEW. TONY: An Appetizer for Self-Destruction?

Dominic Sessa in Matt Johnson's Tony.

A few months ago, I was settling in to the usual pre-movie trailers when the image of Dominic Sessa as a young Anthony Bourdain filled the screen.

Crap! Another celebrity biopic. "Here we go again," I muttered to my husband. I'd heard there was a Bourdain movie in the works, but now I was faced with the reality that I'd probably need to see it. Haven't we seen enough of these dramatizations, the behind-the-scenes tell-all's that usually say very little and show even less about the private lives of public figures?

At their best, biopics can elevate our understanding of a celebrity's genius: their talent, their creative process, their enduring contributions. At their worst, celebrity biopics can leave us frustrated and unsatisfied with a hero's cinematic image. This year's Michael reminds us why Michael Jackson is forever the "King of Pop," but last year's Deliver Me From Nowhere failed to show how the importance of a dark period in Bruce Springsteen's life threatened to derail to his lasting presence as "The Boss."

And don't get me started on Timothée Chalamet's brilliant transformation into enigmatic folk rocker Bob Dylan, whose performance raises as many questions about Dylan's talent as it raises up his significance as a musical icon. I've ranted before about Chalamet's snubbing at the 2025 Oscars, even though, almost two years later, his portrayal of the enigmatic Dylan only deepens every time I watch A Complete Unknown. Chalamet's "version" of Dylan resonates, in part, because it captured the quixotic essence of its subject without digressing into parody or imitation.

Unfortunately, the current clamouring for celebrity biopics is becoming as ubiquitous as interest in the next Marvel Comics movie, threatening to make the genre less impactful and the stories more common. It's the kind of trend that Anthony Bourdain would have looked on with disdain, the same kind of intolerance and impatience he displayed wth any type of pretentiousness or affectation.

Though he never recorded an album or made a box office masterpiece, Anthony Bourdain was, in his own way, a rock star, the ultimate culinary bad boy. Rebellious, irresponsible, excessive, angry, edgy... a raw and sometimes undisciplined talent, but definitely not the type who'd want to see his life (or parts thereof) splattered on the big screen for purposes of entertainment or, even worse, social media and/or audience scrutiny. Turning any period of his life into movie pablum seems antithetical to his raison d’être.

Exactly what, then, I kept thinking, would Anthony Bourdain think about a film that attempts to illustrate how his unruly youth shaped his adult life and subsequently high-profile literary and culinary careers? It was thus with a bit of skepticism that I settled in to a recent matinee screening of Tony, hoping it would not be another forgettable, glossy origin story.

To my great relief, director/co-writer Matt Johnson has avoided many of the pitfalls (culinary and otherwise) that often punctuate the dramatization of a celebrity origin story. Instead, he has crafted a fictionalized version of Bourdain's early years, based in part, on select chapters from Bourdain's first non-fiction publication, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (Bloomsbury, 2000). The result is a first-rate, thoroughly satisfying cinematic aperitif that captures the essential elements of Bourdain's personality and adventurous spirit without exaggeratiion or pendantry.

Bourdain was an accomplished writer, an acclaimed chef, a television host and, perhaps above all, a raconteur extraordinaire. He was also the purveyor of destructive behavior that, in many ways, contributed to his death by suicide in 2018 just days before his 62nd birthday. He was complicated: alternatingly described by those who knew him as both "charming" and "difficult." He indulged in every possible human excess, from sex to food to drugs. On his death, Barak Obama wrote, "He taught us about food — but more importantly, about its ability to bring us together. To make us a little less afraid of the unknown."

How then, does Johnson encapsulate the many moods, idiosyncrasies, and contradictions that defined Anthony Bourdain? In the film, Bourdain is portrayed as a fuck-up, not a pathological one, but a screw-up born of teenage insecurity and doubt. Tony (who initially refuses to be called "Anthony" by anyone but his mother) calls himself a writer but doesn't have a clue about what that means. He is cocky, self-deprecating, a real smart-ass.

But he's also at loose ends. As the movie opens, Tony (The Holdovers's Dominic Sessa) has just learned he's lost a prestigious writing fellowship at Vassar College. Determined to prove his worth, he lies to his parents about receiving the award, then steals off into the night headed for Provincetown, Massachusetts, in pursuit of a girl named Nancy whom he's heard is spending her summer there. Alone and adrift - and soon without money - Tony finds himself working as a dishwasher at a dive restaurant called Flagship, under the tutelage of "Chef" (an Oscar-worthy Antonio Banderas), a Culinary Institute of America alum and former Michelin-starred chef now running his own humble tavern.

A composite of many chefs Bourdain encountered in his youth, Banderas's Chef (referred too as "Bigfoot" in Kitchen Confidentia) is magnificent. He provides the tough love necessary to give Tony the ass-kicking he so desperately needs, and his presence grounds the film in a gentle, but firm way. I've admired Banderas for years: he's a fine actor whose talent has often been overshadowed by his powerfully sexy mannerisms and sensual voice. Banderas has aged like fine wine and here gives another stunning, understated performance. Hopefully, he'll be remembered at Oscar-time.

Tony is clearly out of his element, clueless about life, but observant about everything that is swirling around him. Sessa follows up his Holdovers role nicely here, capturing Bourdain's essential quirks and eccentricities beautifully, without imitating him. The hunch, the shaded eyes, the awkwardness. His eyes are quick, observant: you can see that working in a restaurant kitchen intrigues him, excites him, but also confounds him. He is a writer, after all, and this work seems incongruent with his sense of cultivating a career.

Johnson lets you see Bourdain's "live-for-the-moment" persona burgeoning, though not with any grandiose revelation. The clues are subtle, as are glimpses into what may become personal inadequacies with women. But nothing is flagged with any sort of cinematic declaration or symbolism of what might come later. Leo Woodhall (seen earlier this year in Tuner) as Sal, Tony's fellow line worker (and master oyster-shucker), takes Tony into the underbelly of working class life, giving him a taste of the carnal pleasures that would later punctuate Bourdain's life.T

Many of us have known someone like Anthony Bourdain: the kind of person who is simultaneously charming and maddening, quick-witted and sullen, the kind of soul who is elusive, untethered and intangible, then shows up and makes you feel you are the center of the universe. For awhile. You are unlikely to want (or be able) to spend your life with Tony, but you can't completely eradicate his presence from your mind or your heart.

All that Johnson & Company have attempted here in a kind of understated celebration of Bourdain's teenage rite of passage to the high-profile culinary world he would inhabit are tightly woven and make for a very satisfying movie experience. Depending on the topic or your perspective,  Anthony Bourdain could be a brilliant storyteller or an insufferable asshole. Maybe a bit of both, and Tony is successful overall in depicting Bourdain's good, bad, and ugly.

Except for one thing that keeps nagging at me....

Although he uses select chapters from Kitchen Confidential as his inspiration, Johnson doesn't simply dramatize Bourdain's memoir. He interprets it, and in doing so, makes numerous changes to actual events, some of which don't make complete sense to me.

For example, Tony spends a good deal of the movie pining/chasing an "older" (by one year) Vassar student named Nancy Putkowski (Emilia Jones), a "bad girl" he knows from high school. Much time is spent as Tony oggles, lusts, longs and finally engages with her, only to separate in the end. If Nancy was his muse, we don't clearly see the impact of her presence.

In real life, Bourdain dated Nancy Putkowski in high school and enrolled at Vassar just to be near her. They married in 1985 and were together until their divorce twenty years later. Johnson presents them here as veritable strangers during the summer of 1975, with Tony doing everything to impress a girl that, in the end, walked away.

Having read Kitchen Confidential, I couldn't help but wonder why this adolescent cat-and-mouse game was necessary, as it doesn't really lend any credibility to Bourdain's subsequent restlessness within the culinary world. In a sense, it distorts his summer of 1975 experience in ways that don't completely explain Tony's almost immediate acceptance at the Culinary Institute of America at movie's end. The series of random events presented during that pivotal mid-70s summer didn't quite add up to me. Is Tony and Nancy's real high school romance too pedestrian, too conventional for the celebrity life Bourdain ultimately embraced?

I dunno. I'm guessing that Johnson found Tony's unrequited lust a driving force in what would later become a constant need for personal gratification. It's a stylistic choice that seems to distort Tony's journey rather than explain it, though it doesn't destroy the themes of youthful curiosity explored in the film. For those unfamiliar with Bourdain's life or work, some of these factual changes won't really matter at all.

That said, Tony remains a very affecting, low-key, bildungsroman that uses Anthony Bourdain as its subject. Johnson accentuates his story with enough evocative music to keep the narrative movie, including one especially clever scene set to Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven" that underscores the frantic creativity found in a restaurant kitchen. The scene had an energy that felt inspired, even if Murphy's iconic disco classic wasn't relreased until the summer of 1976. I could go on nit-picking, as there are several other inconsistencies, but that would diminish what I found to be a wonderfully satisfying addition to the rock star biopic genre.

At the end of the movie, as an anxious Tony meets with the admissions board at the Culinary Institute of America, famed French chef Eric Ripert, provides a bittersweet cameo as the chair of the committee. Ripert, who was a close friend of Anthony Bourdain, found him unresponsive in a Paris hotel in 2018 and has since promoted memorial events in Bourdain's honor.

As the camera zooms in for its final shot of a still impressionable Tony (now Anthony), it's hard not to remember how Anthony Bourdain raised the bar on culinary brilliance, on cultivating an adventurous palate, and on appreciating the artistry of punk rock bands like The Ramones. Anything edgy and avant-garde was sure to pique Bourdain's tastes, which typically ran from the exotic to the irreverant. Nothing safe or derivative. Needless to say, playing anything by Billy Joel, Elton John, or Grateful Dead was cause for firing at any of Tony's restaurants.

Rock on.

*******

Tony is currently playing in select theaters. It is rated "R" for profuse profantiy, mild violence and fleeting nudity. It will likely stream on HBO Max and other streaming platforms later this fall.