Tony is a remarkably lowkey film about a pretty unremarkable man. It’s also a biopic of Anthony Bourdain—prematurely departed but forever adored chef and documentarian. If you know anything about Bourdain, you might imagine a biopic with a sharper palate. Instead, and especially when the film is really cooking, all sense of the celebrity is more an aftertaste than main course.
In Tony, the titular, wayward 19-year-old (Dominic Sessa) doesn’t stand out as anyone particularly destined for a life less ordinary. He occasionally uses unique words to impress people at the bar, but too often, like many 19-year-olds whose self-assurance far outstrips their experience, he’s genuinely unlikable. With an opinion of himself as outsized as the vocabulary he wields—but barely understands—he follows his college crush Nancy (Emilia Jones) to Cape Cod for the summer to spend equal time wooing her, despite her barely knowing him, and working on his novel, despite not even starting it yet. Standard coming-of-age stuff.
Culling the first 30 pages or so from Bourdain’s 2000 memoir, Kitchen Confidential, director Matt Johnson condenses some of the author’s formative anecdotes into a breezy summer dramedy. Johnson co-wrote Tony with his creative partner Matthew Miller, both building on a script by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe. In their hands, Tony constantly, and ever gently, pushes against the gravitational pull of Bourdain’s celebrity status. Any expectations of this biopic—of offering an authoritative explanation as to why a person was the way they were—recede from the viewer’s mind like low tide.
The Summer of 1975 ensues. Fleeing to Provincetown after learning that he did not get a college fellowship that he believed would launch him into the adult world as a revered novelist, Tony quickly discovers that Nancy has been dating someone else.
So, with nothing to do and no one to know, Tony gets drunk—too drunk, as it typically goes—and soon after earns an 86-ing from the tiny restaurant bar where he attempted to drown his sorrows. He passes out on the boardwalk where he lands.
The two men who kicked him out are the restaurant’s owner, a Brazilian-born chef with Zen-like patience (Antonio Banderas), and Sal (Leo Woodall), a restaurant worker who’s always on the verge of fighting, fucking, or flaunting that he’s recently fought or fucked. While Sal takes Tony’s last couple dollars, Chef takes pity on the kid, offering him a dishwashing job in his kitchen and a back-porch hammock where he can crash.
As Tony finds unexpected friendships and unearths previously unfelt passions in Chef’s seafood restaurant—more glorified shack than brick-and-mortar—he’s shaken from the torpor of arrested development and drawn to diametrically opposed masculine role models. Sal encourages Tony to embrace the freedom of this time in his life before it sours, while Chef inspires the apathetic teen to abandon solipsism and truly care for something that might soothe his soul rather than numb it. That something might be as humble as the simple motions of preparing dietary staples like lobster rolls, chowder, and freshly shucked oysters.
Tony unfolds with both quiet wonder and complete lack of urgency. In turn, the film’s milieu of a mid-’70s oceanside town emerges casually, in richly tactile moments of smoking, hanging out, eating, wandering, and simply, joyously existing. With cinematographer Michael Bauman—who most recently shot Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another—Johnson manages to capture the indulgent food, sand-spritzed air, and perpetual golden hour of Provincetown with sincerity. These are the nostalgic cornerstones of an ideal youth, not over-romanticized talismans of all the magic Anthony Bourdain would later harness. Tony, at just over 100 minutes, finds so much time to rest in the mundane, and it’s all the lovelier for it. Just watching Antonio Banderas make ketchup can be so intimate.
Under Johnson’s direction, encouraging improvisation, the cast becomes a natural ensemble, but Banderas’s performance is something else entirely, aching like a phenomenal act of kindness. In an especially vulnerable conversation, Chef tells Tony that Sal is his kitchen’s “sin-eater,” the guy who sucks up his coworkers’ badness so they can go on living, buffering those around him from the world’s harshest vibes. While Woodall’s an exceptionally sad-angry wildcard, Chef’s comment is only genuine because Banderas says it so earnestly, commiserating with years of sin-eating, as if he knows well how that feels. In a film full of manchildren—grown boys in the process of making up their shit as they go—Banderas is the film’s guiding light. You’ll swear you saw his eyes twinkle more than twice.
Matt Johnson’s no stranger to manchildren. Only seven months ago, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie premiered in theaters, arguably Johnson’s opus about adults with a really strange, and significantly strained, relationship to growing up. Tony, then, fits well with a filmmaker fixated on the plights of these half-formed people.
Absent any symbolic plot points that draw a straight line from young Tony to fully, dramatically realized Anthony, Johnson’s film is just what it is. A gorgeous sunset need not be anything more than that. Sometimes you can just taste the best fish of your life and… that’s it.
Maybe the most we could hope for in a Bourdain biopic is a Bourdain biopic that doesn’t want to be one—a film that doesn’t explain why someone is so special, but just tries, with warmth and open-heartedness, to translate some of that specialness to the screen. For Tony, and Tony, maturing means understanding that you are not special. To greet the world like Anthony Bourdain did, you have to get outside of yourself, ditch your preciousness, and stumble into the world without reservation.
Tony opens in wide release Fri Aug 21, 106 minutes, rated R.
