Living in a cruel dystopia where the most commercially successful film biopic of all time is a wan apologia for Michael Jackson’s sex crimes, it’s nice to see something that is a bit more critical about its subject. Tony charts a brief summer during the formative years of the late chef, gourmand and cultural wayfarer Anthony Bourdain, and it takes its lead from the older Bourdain’s own proclamation that young Bourdain was an entitled brat who was in need of a good shoeing.
Canada’s Matt Johnson assumes the directing reins for this breezy, ribald account of young Tony (a slimily charming Dominic Sessa), a dilettante indie kid who discovers that he can’t just sass-talk his way into a summer writing scholarship and ends up licking the wounds of crushing failure while washing pots in a Cape Cod lobster shack. Though the film is inspired by Bourdain’s own best selling memoir ‘Kitchen Confidential’, it doesn’t labour on building up the character based entirely on juicy hindsight, and Sessa very much makes him his own dorky self. One of the reasons Tony ends up where he does is down to an old-school, slightly creepy romantic yearning he develops for Nancy (Emilia Jones), an aspiring photographer who is working in a pizzeria down the road from Tony, and he seems to like her precisely because she instantly sees through his bullshit.
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Yet at the centre of the film is a slice of life from a ramshackle kitchen, staffed by a crew of reprobate sous chefs working underneath the strict but fair Chef, beautifully played by Antonio Banderas. On the station opposite Tony is Leo Woodall’s Sal, a teddy boy hustler who uses his little knife to shuck oysters by day and carve notches on bedposts by night. Chef takes pity on Tony and allows him to sleep on his porch over the summer, and the pair strike up a tentative but sweet bond, with the latter discovering that the former is a chef of serious repute who is now slumming it in this cheapo fast-food joint.
The film is almost ambling to a fault, as Tony gradually starts to work out what he wants to do with his life, his apathetic parents left to flail back in New York while he finds himself. Sessa sells the role and pulls no punches in transmitting what a clumsy, cringy loser Bourdain was back then. His attempts at low-slouching punk-rock cool almost always backfire, particularly the myriad use of literary quotations from books he’s never read. Indeed, the film operates as a cautionary tale for anyone who’s attempted to fake passion or follow a path that leads to personal aggrandisement but not personal fulfillment. Banderas is MVP here, and has quietly blossomed into one of the most entertaining and thoughtful actors of his generation. And yet it all feels a little slight, and maybe has more in common with the Jackson movie than initially thought, in that its characterisation feels quite separate from the outspoken, charismatic, wise, troubled personality that was later seared into the public consciousness.