Directed by: Matt Johnson.
Written by: Matt Johnson, Todd Bartels, Lou Howe, and Matthew Miller.
Starring: Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, and Emilia Jones.
Runtime: 106 minutes
Anthony Bourdain biopic ‘Tony’ will have audiences asking for seconds
I’m ready to call it: Dominic Sessa is a star.
The 23-year-old actor returns with a headlining role and proves his winning performance in 2023’s surprise Christmastime charmer “The Holdovers” was no one-off. The stakes are higher here, wish Sessa slipping into the role of beloved and dearly missed celebrity gourmand, writer, and connoisseur of life, Anthony Bourdain.
“Tony” sticks to Bourdain’s early years, taking inspiration from his 2000 memoir “Kitchen Confidential” to offer a portrait of the artist as a young man at a crossroads: Will he end up just another college dropout with thwarted literary ambitions, toiling unseen in kitchens until his body gives out under the strain and drug use, or will he chart his own path outside the narrow confines offered him?
Sessa’s Tony has plenty of dreams, he just can’t see how to reach them. A wry, rangy boy in a Stooges T-shirt with “A Clockwork Orange” poster on his bedroom wall, Tony wants to be the next Hunter S. Thompson, a writer with literary chops and no respect for the establishment. But he needs the establishment’s support: an unserious Vassar student, he applies for a cushy writing fellowship that would send him to New York City to craft what he’s certain will be the Great American Novel, if only someone would recognize his genius.
Alas, it’s not to be the fellowship committee at Vassar, which soundly rejects his proposal, leaving Tony in a lurch, as he cannot bear to tell his family of his failure – nor can he bear to tell Nancy (Emilia Jones), his high school crush whom he’s desperate to impress. So, in a fit of desperate impulsivity, he tells a fib, claiming to have gotten the fellowship, and unbeknownst to Nancy, follows her to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she’s spending the summer.
He’s got no money, and he’s got no plan, but a drunken, angsty night at local seafood joint The Flagship lands him an unglamorous job washing dishes. Scrubbing butter and clam juice in an industrial sink is quite the tumble from Vassar and an all-expenses-paid writing fellowship in New York City, but it’s in this cramped, greasy kitchen that Tony finds what he was so desperately missing.
Like a familiar, well-made dish you’ve eaten a thousand times before, “Tony” satisfies. It hits the predictable beats of a coming-of-age story: there’s the girl of his dreams, just out of reach; the bad boy sidekick and poor influence, Sal (Leo Woodall), a fellow restaurant worker with a cocaine habit who takes him under his wing; and most importantly, there’s his reluctant mentor, the Flagship chef (Antonio Banderas) who teaches Tony that food and its preparation is about so much more than mere sustenance, even as he himself has forgotten that truth. Banderas is wonderful, by the way, mysterious and reserved but as hinting of depth as the ocean; I’d happily watch a whole second film just about him.
It feels greedy, then, to wish that “Tony” was a touch less pleasing. As beloved as Bourdain was and as missed as he is since his death by suicide in 2018, he was a complicated man, imperfect and foul-mouthed with the kind of rock star swagger and disregard for niceties that characterized so many of the artists he openly admired. “Tony” is a perfectly charming movie, but is “perfectly charming” what we want from an Anthony Bourdain movie?
Maybe. Death has a way of gilding memories in gold, and “Tony” has such shine to it. Who knows what Bourdain would think of this cuddly depiction of himself, but one has to imagine him pleased with its understanding of kitchens as a place of community, its cooks a band of brothers in the trenches of social life.
Barbara’s ranking
3/4 stars
