Tony will be released in select theaters on August 7 before expanding nationwide on August 21.
Eschewing the birth-to-death structure of celebrity biopics — as well as estate-mandated aggrandizing — Matt Johnson’s Tony focuses on a few chapters in the life of Anthony Bourdain from his 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. During a summer spent in Cape Cod in the mid-1970s, teenage Tony learns for the first time that food, travel, and culture might be his forté. However, the late chef is hardly painted with a hagiographic brush; in fact, actor Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) builds on minor details from the book, like Bourdain’s cocky swagger and the ridiculous nunchucks he kept tucked into his belt, to create an insolent, selfish, but ultimately driven version of a man whose name we’d come to know.
The movie is a blast, ensuring that Johnson is two-for-two this year alongside his time travel mockumentary, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie; however, the two films could not be more different in scope and style. If anything, Tony — a more measured and intentional work — shares its tonal DNA with Johnson’s BlackBerry, an intense tale of innovators and eventual failures, which grew out of the post-Social Network tech biopic boom. It also wouldn’t be a stretch to call Tony one of the only films to truly understand and recreate what made The Social Network tick: the energy of naïve youth, no matter how destructive.
Part dramatic biography, part coming-of-age comedy, and wholly exciting, Tony begins with a highly fictionalized chapter in Bourdain’s life that sees him fibbing about a writing fellowship at Vassar so he can follow his high school crush, Nancy (Emilia Jones), to Cape Cod. The self-proclaimed author has dreams of grandeur and waxes poetic to anyone who’ll listen (drunkenly, might I add), even if it gets him in hot water. The next thing he knows, he’s working as a dishwasher in a local clam joint to make ends meet while keeping this lowly job a secret from his college peers, and sleeping on the porch hammock of his unnamed Portuguese boss, known only as “Chef” (Antonio Banderas).
The plot follows the growing proximity between Tony and Nancy in the perpetual dusk of Provincetown, but it also sees the young teen learning about the adult world — not only through his boss’ passions and failures, but through the drug-fueled sexual exploits of his coworker, Sal (Leo Woodall). Every male role model in Tony’s life seems to harbor a mysterious melancholy, leading to a fascinating set of performances from the cast. Woodall hides an aggrieved sadness just behind his eyes, while Banderas appears to live with regrets he’s long come to terms with. However, these are mere clues that inform each casual interaction rather than eclipsing the central drama. Ultimately, the mile-a-minute bustle of the cramped kitchen is where the movie lives and breathes, from the uncouth rituals of other supporting players (one particularly verbose cook is played by comedian Stavros Halkias) to the slow transition of Bourdain’s own POV on his new lot in life.
The film adapts only two short initial chapters of Kitchen Confidential, so apart from the broad details of time and place, it may as well be fiction. However, Johnson imbues the story with the spirit of Bourdain himself, capturing not only the tone of his writing (snappy, yet colorful), but the gradual widening of his perspective to consider food as a passion, an art form, and a series of local traditions. Most importantly, it reconnects artistry and artist as broad concepts, refusing to divorce creativity from even the most selfish emotional impulses. If The Social Network reframed Facebook as a romantic wound made manifest in isolation, Tony treats Bourdain’s culinary explorations as stemming from romantic pursuit while surrounded by community.
If the movie drops the ball in one notable way, it’s that Nancy is never quite fleshed out beyond this function in the story, making for some awkward (and at times retrograde) “get the girl” framing. However, Tony also unfolds through the perspective of a hot-blooded teenage boy, and includes all the things a lanky ne’er-do-well like Sessa’s Bourdain might find fascinating or alluring. It moves at the speed of rose-tinted thought, with careful visual compositions that get the point across instantaneously so they can be edited together with controlled chaos. All the while, Sessa makes for a fascinating centerpiece as a young man in search of himself, but with no way to find the right questions, let alone the answers, until he hurts those around him and learns from his mistakes.
It’s a feel-good guy movie in the vein of Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, another college period piece that similarly gazes backward in time while immersing you in its testosterone-drenched escapades, but with enough intellectual distance to excuse its visceral delights as a matter of nostalgic retrospective. It grants permission, in a way, to return to a time when the world seemed so large that anything could be possible, even when the weight of expectations bore down on you with unrelenting force.
It’s perhaps no coincidence that as much as Sessa channels the spirit of Bourdain, he also resembles Johnson himself in look and fast-talking demeanor. This ensures that Tony’s exploration of creative spark as something impure but no less valuable feels deeply personal too, as though the film were about eking out a daring space for filmmaking in the Canadian landscape in the way that Johnson and his cohorts often have. Either way, the result is a biopic laser-focused on the follies of youth and hyper-charged with all its vigor.
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