Nearly a decade since he passed, much of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s life has been laid bare for us across various media. Between his many books, his travelogue television shows, and the posthumous documentary “Roadrunner,” all his lore, either self-professed or observed by loved ones, can be organized chronologically into the spine of a straightforward biopic. But “Blackberry” director Matt Johnson’s approach in “Tony” proves more primal and less conventional than that.
Through all his works, Bourdain glosses over his younger years, leaving a big gap. In “Kitchen Confidential,” Bourdain refers to himself as a “thoughtless young lout who badly needed a good ass-kicking.” Using that brief passage as a jumping off point, “Tony,” set in 1975, tells Bourdain’s origin story, a summer spent in Provincetown, Massachusetts, that shaped the man he would one day become.
Dominic Sessa (“The Holdovers”) plays Tony, a 19-year-old aspiring writer at Vassar. He’s verbose, pretentious, grating, and perpetually pissing off everyone he comes into contact with. Tony applies to a writing fellowship. He’s so sure of himself and his unique talents that he can’t see how badly he fails the interview and sees his acceptance as a foregone conclusion. When he gets the bad news, he refuses to accept the reality and runs away to Provincetown for the summer, chasing Nancy (Emilia Jones), a young woman who was a class ahead of him in high school.
Tony doesn’t know anything about her, and has no idea that they’ll be married to each other for a couple decades. And the film, focused on his boyish hyperfixation, isn’t particularly interested in foreshadowing easter eggs about a story Tony can’t even fathom yet. It’s not about love of destiny. Rather, it’s the kind of coming-of-age story that actually captures how painful and difficult growing up really feels.
Tony gets too drunk at a local restaurant, making the bartender Mary (Monica Raymund) uncomfortable. Chef (Antonio Banderas), the owner, tries to get him to leave nicely, but Tony becomes aggressive. Line cook Sal (Leo Woodall) throws him out, punches him in the face, and then calmly robs him of the only cash he brought to Cape Cod. Chef takes pity on Tony and lets him crash on his hammock. Tony plans to run back home with his tail between his legs, but he runs into Nancy and, rather than tell her the truth about why he came, he lies about the fellowship and claims that he got it and is there to write his novel.
Needing to keep up the charade, Tony gets a job with Chef, sleeping on his hammock and pretending that he has experience working in a kitchen. Therein lies the central conflict of the film: Tony projects a loose idea of who he wants to be, selfishly deceiving everyone in his path and piling collateral damage high along the way until it reaches a breaking point. More than telling Bourdain’s specific origin, this arc taps into the masculine universality of young guys pretending to be grown men.
Sessa plays Tony with an interesting balance between watching a guy be so insufferable you want to see him throttled while also being just charming enough that you can see these fleeting glimpses of the kind of person he could become. It’s a thin line to walk, but Sessa imbues Tony with relatable contradictions, bringing a radical honesty to his depiction of the general irritation all people in their late teens inspire. This Tony tells everyone who listens that he’s a writer, but we never see him type a single word. He just luxuriates in the idea of being a writer, in the prestige and respect he thinks such a solitary vocation will net him. But he doesn’t begin to grow until he is surrounded by older men who have lived real life.
He can’t lie his way through the nitty gritty of kitchen life. In scene after scene, his relative physical weakness, stubbornness, and insecurity repeatedly lead to unavoidable pain. Every plate dropped and broken while washing dishes, every palm burned by grabbing a hot skillet with hands not yet calloused from hard work, every laceration from unsteady knife skills, they all externalize the emotional turmoil Tony undergoes.
Baltimore’s own Stavros Halkias plays another cook (named Stavros) who busts Tony’s balls, and in so doing forms a new makeshift family for him alongside Sal, the guy who once blackened his eye and robbed him blind, but eventually becomes the cooler older brother Tony awkwardly emulates. Banderas’ Chef is a lovable surrogate father, the kind who expects more of Tony than his actual father (played by Rich Sommer), but in a way that slowly engenders actual introspection and change. The relationship between Tony and Chef is not all that different from the one with his mother (Dagmara Domińczyk), who grows frustrated that he isn’t working towards his potential.
Though he doesn’t have as much dialogue as the other colleagues, Tyrone (Michael Jibrin) quietly steals some powerful moments with Tony, carrying himself with the weight of experience that highlights how far Tony is from who he imagines himself to be.
Often, films will make a coming-of-age journey so obvious and perfunctory that the path to change and grow feels entirely too frictionless, but Johnson juxtaposes the breezy hangout-picture vibe of the film’s most entertaining back-of-house scenes with its steadfast dedication to a warts-and-all approach showcasing our protagonist’s faults and flaws. For every funny montage of Tony coming alive in proximity to the crew, there’s a stumble where he puts himself first and causes issues for everyone else. Nothing comes easy for Tony because he won’t stop getting in his own way.
After Nancy catches Tony in the kitchen, he pretends that he is doing research for his novel. He also talks the restaurant up as a fancier establishment than it really is. In reality, it’s like fast food for tourists, even though Chef, who has a history at Michelin starred establishments all over the world, takes every bit of it so seriously because of the discipline imparted from his past experiences.
Watching Tony’s new friends and co-workers make food for their clientele is truly nourishing.There’s a special scene where Chef enlists Tony for some prep work on the one day they’re closed, making him wash out a bunch of glass Heinz ketchup bottles. Tony asks why they don’t just throw them away and buy new ones, and learns that Chef makes all their ketchup from scratch with tomatoes he grows himself and funnels them into those familiar bottles. It truly awakens a different approach in him.
Bourdain has become such a mythic figure in our culture such that many see him as this distant ideal to be studied and emulated rather than a being of flesh and blood. Johnson’s film perspective makes him feel just like the rest of us, a once-insular and misguided boor who blossoms after embracing the comfort of community, of the experiences of others, and the humility of making the world bigger for oneself.
“Tony” is now available to rent or purchase on VOD through Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play, and all other video on demand services.
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