Anthony Bourdain, the acclaimed chef, writer, and TV documentarian who died in 2018 at the height of his stardom, was a man who loved adventure tales and wound up turning his life into one.
Tony is its amusing first chapter.
An origin story about a smugly smart and reckless young man who discovers his calling by throwing caution to the wind and living on the edge, BlackBerry and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie director Matt Johnson’s latest is in many ways a familiar coming-of-age drama. However, courtesy of a lead performance by The Holdovers’ breakout star Dominic Sessa that becomes more convincing and authentic with each passing scene, it has a rough-around-the-edges charm that’s in keeping with its go-for-broke protagonist.
Tony begins in 1975 with Tony (Sessa) making a pitch to three Vassar College professors for a highly coveted fellowship in which he talks about his plans to pen a metaphorical George Orwell-via-Jack Kerouac novel. This sounds like a lot of hot air, and Tony more or less admits as much later that evening.
His concentration soon shifts, though, to Nancy (CODA’s Emilia Jones), an older classmate whom he’s pined for since high school and whose reputation as “unapproachable” feels like a challenge. Alas, despite trying to pick her up by using the word “insouciance” in casual conversation—a sure sign of his arrogance—he strikes out, albeit not before learning that she’s going to be spending the summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
At home following the end of the semester, Tony bristles at his super-supportive father Pierre (Mad Men’s Rich Sommer) and domineering mother Gladys (Succession’s Dagmara Domińczyk). When he loses out on the fellowship (after lying to his parents about earning it), he steals some cash in the middle of the night and heads for Cape Cod, where he promptly discovers that Nancy already has a beau.
With nowhere to go, he binges on Miller High Lifes and oysters at a local seafood joint, The Flagship, and when he gets too handsy with the waitress and causes a scene, he earns himself a knockout punch from employee Sal (Leo Woodall)
If lying in the gutter is his proverbial rock bottom, it’s also the start of his journey toward adulthood. Tony is shown mercy by the Flagship’s demanding owner and chef (Antonio Banderas), who lets him sleep in his porch hammock in exchange for working as the establishment’s dishwasher.
With perpetually slumped shoulders and a petulant “I’m better than you” look in his eyes, Tony reluctantly accepts this position and, with it, the barbs of his colleagues—including Stavros (Stavros Halkias) and Tyrone (Michael Jibrin)—as well as the buckets of water that serve as his morning wake-up calls.
It’s a hard-knock gig for a kid with plenty of self-assurance but little to back it up, and the curly-haired Sessa, channeling his The Holdovers prep-school rebel, inhabits the role with a convincing stew of pride, condescension, courage, and—lurking beneath the bravado and brusqueness—fear.
Johnson is a bit too fond of shot-countershot compositions in which a person’s face is confined to the frame’s side, but his stewardship otherwise has an apt off-the-cuff, go-with-the-flow snappiness.
Tony’s script (by Johnson, Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels, and Lou Howe) rarely indulges in the sort of speechifying that’s featured in awards campaigns. Better yet, it slyly slips a number of biographical Bourdain details into its action—be it the sight of Tony playfully sword-fighting with his coworkers, a drive-in marquee advertising 1970’s Violent City, or a late cameo from Bourdain’s real-life chef friend Éric Ripert—without ever making a big, corny show of them.
There’s a spontaneity and genuineness to Tony, and it really hits its groove at a house party where Tony attempts, with varying degrees of success, to mimic Sal’s ladies-man confidence.
Woodall, who broke through on TV in shows like The White Lotus and Netflix’s One Day, is a riot as an oyster-shucking Masshole lothario who’s quick with an insult and even quicker with his fists, and Sal’s embrace of Tony is the wayward teen’s first step toward figuring out where he wants to be and what he wants to do when he gets there.
That process proves a struggle, however, since Tony’s brashness masks directionlessness and insecurity, and he routinely covers up the pitiful reality of his situation with lies that everyone—except, to some extent, Nancy—sees right through.
Scored to a variety of jaunty ‘70s tunes, Tony swings and sways like a lobster boat in choppy waters off the New England coast, and though that setting would seem to be an unlikely place to find Antonio Banderas, the star makes for a delightful boss and, eventually, mentor. Banderas plays his unnamed chef as a world-class talent who nonetheless relishes existing on the outskirts, getting his hands dirty cooking for the masses. He never allows his fatherly character to become a clichéd archetype, imbuing him with a personality and ethos that makes sense as an inspirational force in the maturing Tony’s life.
Tony is, of course, destined to realize during the course of this summer odyssey that he belongs in the kitchen—and that his experiences in it are the fuel for his authorial dreams—but Johnson doesn’t underline such points or unduly hint at what comes next.
The film’s big issue is simply one of conception: namely, because of its narrow purview, Tony is a tad slight, functioning as simply the prologue to its protagonist’s culinary success in New York City (culminating at Manhattan’s Brasserie Les Halles), rise to celebrity prominence with his best-seller Kitchen Confidential, and subsequent transformation into a television phenomenon with Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations.
Yet when taken on its own limited terms, Johnson’s biopic enlivens its conventions with endearing prickliness, and if Jones’ Nancy is never more than a plot device, her chemistry with Sessa is strong enough to provide the proceedings with a requisite measure of romantic heart.
It may be little more than a tease that leads viewers to Bourdain’s copious written and screen works, but as far as amuse-bouches go, Tony is a memorably tasty one.
