Tony, the new film about Anthony Bourdain, does something very bold for a biopic of a beloved figure: It concentrates on a part of his life when he was an irredeemable asshole. Sound harsh? I didn’t make it up. Here is the opening quote, from Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, shown right up there on the big screen:
“I was—to be frank—a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”
Collective memory can be slippery. We remember what we want, or what media and other influences push us toward. We tend to think of Bourdain as a foul-mouthed, leather-jacketed Edward R. Murrow for our time, and we remember that he was once a tough guy chef who did a wee bit of heroin for a spell. This movie bravely concentrates on a less appealing time in his life.
Tony (directed by Matt Johnson and released by A24 starting Aug. 7) covers just one summer of Bourdain’s life. He has applied for a writing fellowship at Vassar and leads family and friends to believe he has gotten it. He has not. He develops a crush on an old acquaintance in a bar. When she tells him she is spending the summer in Provincetown, he does what any narcissistic jerk would do: He steals money from his trusting father and gets on a bus north. Once he arrives, he shows strangers the photo of her he ripped out of his yearbook and tracks her down. Of course, she has a boyfriend.
So he goes to a restaurant, gets drunk and eats oysters (both constant themes in the movie, as in his life), grabs a female server’s arm, and is beaten and thrown out. While he’s passed out on the curb, his money is stolen by one of the cooks. (People with an eye to historical accuracy will appreciate the Velcro wallet.)
He lies his way into a dishwashing job at the same restaurant in exchange for a hammock on the chef’s porch. The lies pile up at a considerable rate, as do instances of his getting caught in them. Being dishonest about anything, it turns out, is kind of like pretending you know how to shuck an oyster.
Revisit Wine Spectator’s March 31, 2015, cover story on Bourdain: “The Cooked and the Raw.”
Even if you don’t remember the book, you probably recognize what’s coming: Guy falls in with felonious badasses, acquires a mentor, finds a woman, makes mistakes, learns, makes more mistakes, and ultimately comes to some sense of who he is. But Karate Kid it ain’t. This movie is unflinching in showing the damage Bourdain does along the way.
Dominic Sessa had his work cut out playing such a beloved person. He may occasionally overdo the loping walk, but overall, he seems to possess the character. He strikingly nails the tilt of Bourdain’s head, the look in his eyes showing the late-teenage fake arrogance born of insecurity and the pain of repeated failure. I was primed for the film to make Bourdain cooler than he claimed to be at that age. It doesn’t, and Sessa digs in for it.
Emilia Jones is good as the love interest (who in real life would become Bourdain’s first wife), especially when she calls him out. Leo Woodall is great as the bad influence—fun in a Trainspotting kind of way. The chef Bourdain works for, who is the movie’s center of discipline, is played by Antonio Banderas. It’s mostly a quiet performance, but it builds. And the brief appearance of Dagmara Domińczyk as Bourdain’s mother is great. She holds him to a higher standard, or sees through his bullshit, or both.
Is the movie a masterpiece? No, but it is well-made and fun, and the performances—especially Sessa’s—are really good. Plus, it’s fun to spend time with the pre-deification Bourdain, when he had his feet (or knees or head) on the ground. If this movie were about someone else—like, say, me—would you want to see it? Of course not, but that isn’t the point. This is an origin story for a person who remains present in the culture years after his death by suicide.
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