"Tony" Review

The opening of Tony, the biopic about a young Anthony Bourdain - the famous chef, author, and TV host who decided a life of globe-trotting, meeting interesting foods and eating exotic peoples, plus banging Asia Argento, wasn't enough to keep living for in 2018 - is a title card with this quote from his book, Kitchen Confidential: “I was a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” It's a fitting apéritif for what follows, the depiction of young man stumbling into a new vocation while being somewhat the ass in the process.

Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) stars as Bourdain, going by "Tony" as a 19-year-old Vassar freshman with dreams of being a writer. He applies for a writing fellowship which would take him to New York and lies to his family that he got it when in reality someone else got it. Caught out, he decides to go to Provincetown, MA (at the tip of Cape Cod) to chase after Nancy (Emilia Jones, CODA), a girl he's got a crush on since high school who's a year older and told him she'd be staying for the summer.

When he gets there, he discovers she appears attached to another guy at the pizza place she's working. He goes to a seafood place called The Flagship and gets drunk and when he's rude to Mary (Monica Raymund, Chicago Fire), the barmaid, he's thrown out and beaten up, then later robbed by Sal (Leo Woodall, Tuner), a worker in the kitchen. The owner, Chef (Antonio Banderas, Desperado), takes Tony home and puts him in the hammock on the porch of his small beach house.

Broke, Tony apologizes to Chef and begs for a job at Flagship and to keep sleeping on the hammock. Chef, believing Tony when he claims to have kitchen experience, brings him on as a dishwasher, eventually advancing him to oyster shucking and more all while continuing to wake him up with water dumped on him. While he's interested in the cooking stuff, Tony still sees himself as a writer and persists in lying to Nancy and himself as to what his destiny is.

It is to the credit of director/co-writer Matt Johnson (lasts seen starring and directing Nirvanna The Band The Song The Movie) in approaching this part of Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential memoir that he doesn't lay on too thick the idea that a lightning bolt struck Tony to make him realize cooking was going to be his path to becoming an author. It's just a summer in a confused young man's life where he's still sorting out who he even is when he's not fronting what he wishes he was. 

During my traditional post-biopic fact checking, I found it was fairly true to the fictionalized references in Kitchen Confidential, though in order to create a more dramatic impetus to the plot it fudged the fact that Tony and Nancy had already dated for a few years before their planned mutual trip to Provincetown and that they eventually married about a decade later before divorcing 20 years after that. Tony wasn't chasing no skirt, yo!

In my review of The Holdovers I faulted Sessa's performance as the weak link, presumably due it being his first film role. Well, in the intervening few years he's really stepped up his game because here he balances the competing impulses of Tony while hinting at his future without obviously mimicking Bourdain's distinct style. Well done. It's also good to see Antonio Banderas getting some room to work as Chef instead of being wasted as he was in last year's Babygirl. (In a meta bit of IYKYK casting, when Tony applies to the Culinary Institute of America at the end, the main instructor is played by chef Eric Ripert, Bourdain's bestie and traveling companion who got to find his friend's body.)

While small-scale and slightly fibby, Tony is a decent coming-of-age biopic about someone whose talents are sorely missed. (The missus was so angry at his suicide she got rid of all his books and avoids his shows.)

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.