Anthony Bourdain summed up his late teens in a typically eloquent, withering fashion: “I was,” he wrote in his bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential, “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of
a good ass-kicking.” That self-deprecating description opens Tony, writer-director Matt Johnson’s movie about the one crazy summer that changed a thoughtless young lout’s life; for good measure, the quote does double duty as the tagline on the film’s poster. This parable then spends 99.9 percent of its running time making a rock solid case for those last seven words. You may not recognize Bourdain, the future Keith Richards of the kitchen and globe-hopping TV personality, in the restless-youth chrysalis form presented here. You will undoubtedly agree, however, that this loudmouth jackass slouching towards Bethlehem, a.k.a. Cape Cod, is in serious need of a proper walloping.
Which young Tony B. will get, in both the literal and metaphorical senses, and eventually emerge as the bad-boy butterfly that will discover his destiny lies behind hot burners and a hatred of brunch. This is the sort of biopic that promises to give you the child for 90 minutes, and it will show you the man — a subset of the genre that operates on already knowing that fame and fortune are foregone conclusions. You know the type: That medical student on a road trip will become a posterboy for revolution, that bespectacled Liverpudlian will change the world by picking up a guitar, etc.
These movies always run the risk of being overly reverent, and for better or worse, Johnson’s take on Bourdain’s formative years is not concerned with reverence. It’s not here to print the legend regarding those months spent learning the mystical ways of restaurant grunt work, which have been more than enough for a Bildungsroman — a word young Bourdain keeps repeating and mispronouncing — of debauched delights. You may, however, wish that it had. Or that this A24 film had simply changed the names to protect the guilty and unload the baggage, given that Tony works best as a compelling, slightly cracked coming-of-age story if, and only if, you forget that the kid onscreen is supposed to be Anthony Bourdain. (It opens in NY and LA on August 7th, and goes wide August 21st.)
“I wanna write a cross between Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and On the Road!” exclaims Bourdain, played with equally parts livewire crackle and low-simmer moodiness by The Holdovers‘ Dominic Sessa. The year is 1975, the place is Vassar, and Tony is attempting to con his way into a university fellowship in order to pen a novel. He doesn’t get it, which will not stop the desperate, aspiring youngster from telling everybody he did regardless. Especially if the whole “I’m a writer” thing helps him get into the pants of Nancy (CODA‘s Emilia Jones), his high-school crush who he spots at a local bar. She’s not buying his bullshit. But Nancy does casually mention that she’s going to be up at the cape all summer, so maybe they’ll see each other in the fall at school? That little nugget of info is all Tony needs to alter his trajectory. Go northeast, young man. Cue Bourdain’s own version of Down and Out in Provincetown.
After schlepping his way up to P-town, spying on Nancy smooching a guy at her work, and being thrown out of a local eatery known as the Flagship for drunken assholery, Bourdain begins his journey in earnest. Waiting for the ferry to go home, our black-eyed hero runs into Nancy. The teeny morsel of encouragement she gives him is enough to make him rethink returning home. He hits up the Flagship’s owner, a crusty but lovable Portuguese chef known only as “Chef” (Antonio Banderas) who let the kid sleep off his first-night hangover on his hammock, for a job. This composite character of several different Bourdain mentors will let him work as a dishwasher on a trial basis. Chef is the angel on Tony’s shoulder. There’s also a devil, all too ready to perch on his other shoulder as well.
His name is Sal (The White Lotus‘s Leo Woodall). He’s the guy who graced Tony with that shiner — for being a lout badly in need of a good ass-kicking, naturally — and also serves on the line in the Flagship’s kitchen, alongside the restaurant’s fellow staffers Stavros (Stavros Halkias) and Tyrone (Michael Jibrin). Sal knows how to properly spark a Zippo, seduce women, shuck oysters, throw a punch, and other Bad-Ass Masshole Cool 101 lessons. He’s the one he introduces the hopeless Tony to the wonders of cocaine and the blissful summer fuckery that is the birthright of those young, dumb, and full of you know what. Every evening, Sal and Tony finish their shifts and hit the taverns. Every morning, Chef wakes Tony with a bucket of cold sea water. Saturday nights are alright for fighting. Sundays, Chef drags the kid to church.
Both of them slowly indoctrinate Tony in the brotherhood among line cooks that’s the equivalent of the bond between soldiers in foxholes, and it’s in those scenes that you get glimpses of the Bourdain from those compressed best-summers-ever chapters of Kitchen Confidential. Incidents like Tony burning his hand on a white-hot skillet — earning his coworkers’ mockery and contempt by asking for burn cream — and witnessing a bride leave her wedding dinner in order to schtup a cook are recreated for maximum effect. Ditto a late-night fishing excursion that underlines the importance of food to community, and vice versa. Heroin makes a cameo. An almost off-handed mention of suicide in passing is as close to heavy-handed as things get.
Sessa lets you see how this malleable version of Tony keeps gleaning life lessons from both of his tutors, pinging between the yin of Sal’s petty-criminal allure and the yang of Chef’s calm, steady approach to food service. (It’s impossible to overstate how vital Banderas is here — not just in terms of the part, but to the film as a whole. He’s bringing an entire history to this character even when he’s just quietly beaming or silently looking disappointed.) And like every hero bound for glory before him, Bourdain has to make a choice, inevitably experiencing a lifechanging moment of clarity at a clambake. He will soon emerge from his cocoon, reborn as Anthony and a life that will be filled with triumphs, tragedies, world tours, and roast bone marrow delights. Before we get to that, Tony takes us on a familiar ride of romanticized youthful follies, romantic fails — though this Nancy will become his first wife — and the rough turbulence associated with going from boyhood to manhood. Familiar, in fact, to a fault. And therein lies the problem.
Because Tony is so intent on presenting this pilgrim’s progress according to a prefab template that it not only rejects the mythology surrounding Bourdain’s public persona, still years away from hitting its rock-star potential. It embellishes, extends, twists, tweaks, and ultimately reduces how he got there in the first place. Johnson has confessed to going into this project cold in terms of knowledge about the swashbuckler of the 1990s food scene, and thus not being beholden to de facto hero worship; his fellow writers Todd Bartel and Lou Howe have noted that the focus on this period specifically allowed for them to avoid being part of the posthumous Bourdain Industrial Complex. Which, y’know — thank you for that.
Yet their portrait of the artist as a hopeless snot-nosed punk doesn’t seem interested in knowing who this guy was past being another dude in search of a purpose. It’s Hopeless Fuck-Up Confidential at best and, given the ways liberties start to pile up regarding Bourdain’s actual coming of age, shaggy superhero-origin-story fan fiction at worst. Far be it from us to knock a biopic for playing fast and loose with facts — the genre’s poetic licenses must be perpetually renewed in the name of telling a good story onscreen. But the combo of Johnson’s need to turn an individual’s tale into something so doggedly universal with a purposeful lack of affection for the subject makes you wonder why they bothered making it. Maybe we don’t need a straight down the middle, greatest-hits style Bourdain biopic. I’m not sure we need Bourdain the Man the Show the Movie, either.
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