How did Anthony Bourdain become Anthony Bourdain?
It’s a question that “Tony,” the recently released biopic directed by Matt Johnson, seems in no hurry to answer. The film has a breezy quality to it. Set during the summer of 1975, it follows 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain, known to his friends as Tony, who makes an impulsive decision to travel to Provincetown, Mass., to pursue his high school crush after he fails to get a prestigious writing fellowship. Things don’t exactly work out with his crush: He winds up getting robbed and loses all his money, forcing him to work at a local restaurant, The Flagship, as a dishwasher under the tutelage of its enigmatic head chef.
Dominic Sessa plays Tony. It is his first leading role since his debut in 2023’s “The Holdovers,” which similarly placed Sessa in the 1970s. He has a particular knack for convincing the viewer he belongs in the setting; he carries himself in a way that would have fit an actor of that era perfectly. Sessa plays Tony as Bourdain saw himself in that time: pathetic, spoiled, full of himself. This is not the casual and relaxed Bourdain whom we know so well from his travel shows like “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown,” but an arrogant young man who constantly gets ahead of himself. “I’m a writer,” he introduces himself to everyone he meets, in spite of the fact that we never see him write at all.
Sessa’s portrayal relies so little on the character of Bourdain in his later life that it is easy to forget that the film is about a young Bourdain. Matt Johnson wisely chooses just to tell a story: that of a lost youth looking for his dreams in all the wrong places, not quite as talented as he wishes he might be and in dire need of getting his selfishness beaten out of him.
Johnson’s background is in comedy. His most recent film was “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie,” based on his earlier television series “Nirvanna the Band the Show,” which he co-created with frequent collaborator Jay McCarrol (who also composed the score for “Tony”). That film was an absurdist comedy involving time travel and alternate universes, a riff on “Back to the Future.”
At first, “Tony” might seem entirely different, a grounded and often harsh portrait of a larger-than-life man that attempts to find humanity in his youth. But Johnson is a person with a lot of heart, something you can feel in both works. He is interested in what it means to grow up, whether that takes the form of a 19-year-old stuck in Provincetown or two best friends in their 40s still trying to figure out how to be musicians. Both films also happen to be very funny in the process.
The heart of “Tony” comes from Tony’s relationship with Chef (played by Antonio Banderas), whose name no one in town seems to know. Our introduction to Chef is him kicking Tony out of his restaurant after Tony gets rowdy while drinking his sorrows away. At the same time, he lets Tony crash in his hammock in exchange for working an unglamorous job as a dishwasher. Banderas plays a perfect father figure, a stern taskmaster who possesses a gentle and soft-spoken demeanor. Chef splashes Tony with seawater to wake him up in the morning, drags hims to Mass every Sunday and demands no one on his staff take God’s name in vain.
When Tony protests being forced to go to church, saying he doesn’t believe in God, Chef replies, “How can you not believe in God? You can say you don’t believe in air, but you’re still breathing it, aren’t you?”
Chef’s worldview inspires much of Tony’s growth through the film. Tony’s other mentor is Sal (played by Leo Woodall), who shucks oysters at The Flagship. He’s a boisterous person, incredibly fun to be around but prone to mischief and misfortune. Very promiscuous, beset with a terrible drug habit and a casual disregard for authority, Sal is everything that Chef is not. Chef calls him “sin eater,” the dark entity around the restaurant that absorbs the bad from everyone else so that their souls can be clean. Yet Chef cares about him and gives him second chances, even when Sal reacts with violence.
“Tony” is a beautiful movie. It is both a frustrating narrative of a young man who doesn’t seem to realize how he’s getting it all wrong and also a calm, relaxing film about a correctly misspent summer on the Cape. It is certainly Johnson’s most traditionally shot film, but cinematographer Michael Bauman (whose prior works include “Licorice Pizza” and “One Battle After Another”) infuses it with a cozy warmth, and he makes you feel the tactile joys of living in a coastal beach town in Massachusetts (plus the shots of seafood will leave you hungry for clams and lobster).
At the beginning, Tony says he wants to write a novel, a bildungsroman, but that it’s more of an “idea of an idea.” He has no idea what it really means to grow up. He uses big words to seem smart, but he doesn’t know what they really mean. When we first meet Tony, he tries to pick up his crush by asking her if she knows what the word “providence” means. At the end, he gets his answer from her: “the protective guiding attention of God.”
Tony never gets exactly what he wants, but through this providential summer, he finds what he needs: the ability to look past himself, acknowledge his own failings and try to grow up.
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