Dig into the dirty dishes that launched the lauded career of Anthony Bourdain
Chef (Antonio Banderas) and young Anthony Bourdain (Dominique Sessa) suit up in the kitchen.
Tony
Starring Dominique Sessa, Antonio Banderas & Emilia Jones
Directed by Matt Johnson
Rated R
In theaters Friday, Aug. 21
How did Anthony Bourdain become a renowned celebrity chef, TV personality and globetrotting documentarian of international life and cuisine? This biopic shows you the unlikely, unsteady roots of the culinary superstar.
Dominique Sessa plays young Bourdain, 19 years old in 1975 and fresh out of Vassar College in New York. He pompously drops big words (like “insouciant,” “valediction” and “providential”) and aspires to be a serious writer, like George Orwell or Jack Kerouac. He’s also a bit of a truth-stretcher. As Bourdain himself says in the words that open the film—taken from his 2010 memoir— he was a “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”
The ass-kicking comes, sure enough—along with a course-setting direction for his life—when he takes a job washing dishes in the kitchen of a small seafood restaurant in Providence, R.I. That’s where he goes, after swiping money out of his father’s wallet, to track down his old high-school crush, Nancy Putkoski (Emilia Jones, from Netflix’s Locke & Key and HBO’s Task).
A lot of the course-setting (and the ass-kicking) come courtesy of Antonio Banderas as “Chef,” the Portuguese seafood-restaurant owner who hires him—after throwing his drunk, punk and pugnacious ass out onto the street.
Director Matt Johnson—whose previous films include the conspiracy thriller Operation Avalanche and the cult-hit mockumentary TV series Nirvana the Band Show—has a deft touch behind the camera, bringing us into Bourdain’s formative world with seasonings of wit and warmth. Sessa, so good as a waylaid college student in The Holdovers (2023), grounds everything as Bourdain, unsure of where he’s headed but always laid-back and observing, absorbing and processing, taking it all in. We can practically see the wheels turning in his head. Sessa is particularly well-cast; tall, gangly and bushy-headed, he physically resembles Bourdain at that age, and that stage.
Emilia Jones plays Tony’s crush.
Director Johnson captures the essence of the ’70s in every detail, from wire-rim glasses, hairstyles and bell bottoms to music, with well-placed needle drops on Kool & the Gang (“Hollywood Swinging”), the Brothers Johnson (“Strawberry Letter 23”) and Walter Murphy (“A Fifth of Beethoven”). And the movie effectively conveys the crackling chaos and zesty chemistry of the noisy restaurant kitchen, with workers joshing each other, tossing around profanities, sniffing coke, shelling mussels, making lobster thermidor—and gathering around a table to share a pot of squid stew after hours.
Banderas’ Chef takes Bourdain under his wing, giving him a place to sleep and becoming his mentor, tutoring him on catching, prepping and cooking seafood. The supporting cast—particularly Leo Woodall from HBO’s The White Lotus, and comedian Stavris Halkias, both playing coworkers—provides a crackling camaraderie that further bonds Bourdain to the high spirits and competitive spunk of the restaurant kitchen.
But this isn’t a movie about food, per se. It’s about how a young, self-absorbed kid found a direction for his life he didn’t know he wanted or needed. Bourdain longed to be a writer, and he eventually did, penning the best-seller Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. It’s about his incubation in that underbelly, before he became a chef in a prestigious Manhattan restaurant and later a media personality on the Food Network, the Travel Channel and CNN.
The movie doesn’t show how Mary—whom Anthony attempts to woo by cracking open an oyster for her at a party—later becomes Bourdain’s wife, or that Bourdain’s life would end tragically in 2018, by suicide when he was 61. But one scene does point to a sobering endpoint, when Bourdain asks about a painting of François Vatel, a 17th century chef, and is told he took his own life when a delivery of fish didn’t show up. Vatel’s life was built on food, as Bourdain’s was about to become.
Tony is a sweet, savory and sometimes spicy snapshot of Bourdain beginning the journey to find his mojo, learning about pots and pans and people, and about how dirty dishes directed him to a passion for all things culinary, and beyond.
—Neil Pond