★★★½ (3½ out of 4)
This is not a biopic. You need to know that before forking over the bucks to see “Tony” at your local multiplex. Don’t get me wrong. You should pay up. “Tony,” a riveting, rambunctious portrait of the young Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa), contains practically nothing about the American, soon-to-be celebrity chef, author and travel documentarian who lived hard and died of suicide by hanging in 2018 after forging a path into the light and dark and sexual provocation of cooking (read his bestselling 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential) that has been unrivaled ever since.
“Tony” introduces us to a young man who doesn’t know who he is. And he’s not quite bothered by it. The bad boy who would be the rock-star king of the culinary world had yet to make his appearance. Most Wikipedia-type write-ups about Tony throw away those early days with a sentence: On summertime break before dropping out of Vassar College, he worked at seafood restaurants in Provincetown, Massachusetts, including the Lobster Pot, which inspired his decision to pursue cooking as a career.
That “throwaway” time is what “Tony” the movie is all about. And under the freewheeling direction of Matt Johnson (“BlackBerry” and current cult fave “Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie”) and the appealingly off-center script he cooked up with Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, “Tony” turns one summer month into a life in miniature.
A riveting, rambunctious portrait of the young Anthony Bourdain, played by a sensational Dominic Sessa
“Tony” the movie holds steady on the summer of 1975 when Tony, as played with wired intensity and carefully concealed sensitivity by Sessa, found himself in the restaurant business. Sessa plays this middle-class white boy from New Jersey as a punk kid who’s unabashedly elitist. The film uses a quote from Kitchen Confidential as its opener: “I was—to be frank—a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”
Sessa gets that. And so does the movie. Tony is on Cape Cod in ’75 to puppy-dog follow his high school crush and later first wife Nancy (“Coda” star Emilia Jones). For pocket money, he works as a dishwasher at a seafood shack called the Flagship. He’s humiliated. And he should be. His fellow kitchen slaves know that whatever the job needs, Tony doesn’t have it. Respect will come, but it won’t come easy.
Tony’s teachers are the Flagship’s unnamed chef, bracingly and beautifully played by Antonio Banderas, whose internal warmth keeps radiating from inside his boss exterior. For kicks, Tony buddies up with Sal (Leo Woodall, sexily sleazy) who teaches him the craft of shellfish shucking and the orgasmic high that will come from his first hit of cocaine.
Johnson is clearly condensing a lifetime of hard lessons for Tony into one movie that plays like part frat house romp and part higher education in why cooking is an art. Somehow it all works. And if “Tony” makes you want to know more about the brat kid who became prince of kitchen city, so much the better. One day someone may craft a film about Bourdain’s entire life cycle. “Tony” is just the appetizer, a cooking term for something that stimulates the appetite. Mission accomplished.