Recently, I got to sneak out of work midday to check out an early screening of Tony. It hits theaters this Friday, followed by an expanded national release on August 21. |
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Tony, the new Bourdain biopic, is surprisingly charming |
I went into Tony, Matt Johnson’s new Anthony Bourdain biopic, as I imagine many people in the food world did: hesitant and somewhat hoping to hate it, by virtue of my aversion to the way the chef has been mythologized in the eight years since his death. While I think Laurie Woolever, Bourdain’s longtime assistant and author of a 2021 oral biography, is one of the rare people who’s earned the right to tell his story, I’ve found many other attempts to take advantage of the chef’s name and reputation lurid and unnecessary.
And so, Tony: Here is the coming-of-age biopic that promises to show Tony before he became “Bourdain.” It hits theaters on August 7, with expanded national distribution on August 21. Drawing on early chapters of Bourdain’s own groundbreaking book Kitchen Confidential, Tony limits itself to the summer of 1975, when, having failed to secure a writing fellowship as a student at Vassar College, a 19-year-old Tony (played by Dominic Sessa) follows a girl to Provincetown, Massachusetts. Desperate to make it through the summer and with his dreams of becoming a real writer temporarily dashed, he lands at the dish pit of a scuzzy restaurant.
In real life, Bourdain wrote of the kitchen workers he encountered in Provincetown — the ex-con, the ex-hippie, the “half-mad” divorcee — as being “like gods” to him. In the movie, Tony, too, adopts a tentative admiration of the kitchen’s motley crew, bonding over family meal and following them to parties and drug buys. Setting the tone for the movie is an opening line from Kitchen Confidential: “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” He gets that ass-kicking and more.
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Despite my initial reservations, I was charmed by Tony (and found that similarly hesitant friends shared my sense of relief when they saw the film). What makes Tony compelling, to me, is that it dares to let Bourdain be unlikeable, slowly teasing out our sympathy. In much of the movie, its namesake is insufferable, displaying not the deep-voiced, earned swagger of the worn traveler and experienced cook, but the half-cocked, shaky braggadocio of an insecure boy; it’s Bourdain, we’re reminded, who’s the myth and the legend. The movie renders Tony more of the run-of-the-mill male manipulator type, more sensitive than he’s willing to reveal but too proud to admit to his shortcomings. In Tony’s portrayal of Bourdain, the film pulls at something endearingly universal: the uncomfortable reality of being 19 and knowing who you want to be, but not quite how to get there — and pissing off everyone around you in the process.
Read my full review of Tony here. |
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Most of Tony is set in Cape Cod. We recently updated our map of the best restaurants in the area, and we’ve got a specific guide to Provincetown, too, in case a Cape Summer is in your August plans. (Save your picks on the Eater app for easy access on the road.)
- From the archive: Who knows Anthony Bourdain? In 2021, Maria Bustillos interviewed Bourdain’s longtime assistant and collaborator Laurie Woolever about her oral biography of the chef.
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The book accompaniment to Tony — titled Happier, Stupider Times: Bourdain’s Provincetown Years — is now available for preorder. It features recipes, Provincetown ephemera, and old photos of the chef. (A24 Store)
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This is how 23-year-old actor Dominic Sessa, who broke out with 2023’s The Holdovers, channeled the young Bourdain. (GQ)
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