Before Anthony Bourdain became the chef, author and TV host who taught an audience to eat, travel and look at the world with curiosity, he was Tony, a 19-year-old who didn't quite know what to do with himself.
“I was—to be frank—a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” Bourdain wrote of himself in Kitchen Confidential, his 2000 memoir. It is an unusually unsparing assessment, and very much the man we meet in director Matt Johnson’s coming-of-age film about the young Bourdain.
Johnson and his co-writers Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe take their ideas and inspiration from early chapters of the bestselling Kitchen Confidential, particularly Bourdain's experiences in Provincetown, while taking cinematic liberties to shape it into a comic drama. Tony is less interested in recreating a life than in capturing a formative moment.
The film opens in 1975. Tony, as he calls himself, is a student at Vassar College, an aspiring writer with a considerable sense of his own intelligence and very little evidence yet of what he might do with it. He goes to Provincetown, Massachusetts, chasing Nancy (Emilia Jones), the girl he wants to impress, and finds himself working at a seafood restaurant, The Flagship. When the writing fellowship he has applied for doesn’t come through, Tony doesn’t admit it. He lies. He is full of hubris and convinced of his intellectual superiority, often displaying his knowledge, particularly of the English language.
Yet for all his swagger, there is something deeply uncertain about him. This is where Dominic Sessa's performance as Tony is particularly effective. He doesn't attempt an imitation of the older Bourdain; he seems to have internalised the young man's contradictions. Tony is rarely as confident as he wants people to believe. He watches people from the corners of his eyes. His shoulders are often hunched. He doesn't carry himself with the confidence of someone who walks into a room certain that he belongs there. The arrogance feels less earned and more like armour.
The filmmakers deserve credit for not whitewashing him. Tony is troubled, complicated and not always easy to like. He is also a young man who badly needs to find himself. His relationship with his mother is one of the film’s more tantalisingly underdeveloped elements. She is critical of him, and Tony responds with his own reflexive judgement. There is clearly a troubled history between them, but the film doesn’t explain or explore it—one of several places where Tony hints at a deeper psychological portrait without fully pursuing it.
The film finds its strongest material in the time Tony spends at The Flagship where he experiences a world of hierarchy, discipline and physical work, far removed from his upbringing and ambitions. Antonio Banderas plays the restaurant owner and head chef as an unexpectedly gentle, paternal presence. His quietude and tenderness give the film a welcome emotional balance. He offers Tony patience, discipline and the possibility of taking pride in actually knowing how to do something.
Then there is Sal, played by Leo Woodall, the other, darker influence on Tony. Sal is brash, defiant and disrespectful. Woodall is very well cast, capturing the character’s inherent streak of violence and disregard for convention. He introduces Tony to drugs and excess, but also represents the freedom of someone who is uninterested in asking permission. These are qualities Tony is drawn to and influenced by.
Between Chef and Sal, Tony is pulled in two directions: towards discipline and craft on one side, and recklessness and transgression on the other.
The television series The Bear also offers a ringside view of the small American kitchen as a simmering ecosystem of hierarchy, pressure and dysfunction. But where The Bear turns the kitchen into a pressure cooker that exposes its characters, Tony uses it more simply as the setting is which a lost young man begins to find his bearings.
The problem is that Tony never quite hits its stride. The film ends before the Bourdain we know has properly emerged. There is no celebrated chef, bestselling writer, television personality or globe-trotting raconteur. The film stops just as Tony’s life is about to take off. It is an interesting choice for an origin story, but it also leaves the film feeling oddly incomplete.
We certainly know more about Bourdain by the end. We see some of the ingredients that will go into the man he becomes: the ego, the intellectual restlessness, the appetite, the attraction to outsiders, the complicated relationship with authority. But this particular chapter doesn’t entirely make for good cinema.
If Tony were not Anthony Bourdain, this would be a strictly passable coming-of-age story about a privileged young man who follows a girl to Provincetown, lies about a failed fellowship, gets a kitchen job, encounters drugs and delinquency, and finds an unlikely mentor. What gives it its charge is our knowledge of the extraordinary life that lies ahead, and of his tragic end.
And that makes the ending more poignant. Tony is finding the world that will give him a voice. Those final moments leave you wondering what happened between this tentative beginning and the person Bourdain became. The film doesn’t bridge the space between Tony the boy and Anthony the celebrity chef.
‘Tony’ is in theatres.
Udita Jhunjhunwala is a Goa-based writer and curator.