Film review: Tony is a portrait of the chef as a young, messed-up man

Dominic Sessa as Anthony Bourdain in Tony. Photo by Seacia Pavao /A24

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Good luck getting a sense of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain from the fictional dramatization that is Tony. You’re about as likely to watch a handful of Harry Potter movies and come away with a workable recipe for butterbeer.

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But Canadian director Matt Johnson (Blackberry, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie) isn’t looking to serve up a biography of Bourdain, who died in 2018 at the age of 61.

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Rather, he’s trying to capture the emotional essence of a 19-year-old chef-to-be when he was — in his own words, drawn from his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential — “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”

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And who better to embody that lout than the lanky, gawky Dominic Sessa, who delivered a similar vibe in his breakout performance in Alexander Payne’s wonderful 2023 Christmas comedy The Holdovers?

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That one was set in 1970 in a fictional New England boys school. This one opens at Vassar College, 1975, with Tony badly bullshitting his way through an interview for a writer’s scholarship. He trots out the word “Bildungsroman” but pronounces it “buildings Roman.” He doesn’t get the gig.

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Undeterred — well, quite deterred but also smitten with a girl from high school — Tony heads to Provincetown in Cape Cod, Mass., where Nancy (Emilia Jones) mentioned she’d be spending the summer.

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From left, Antonio Banderas, Dominic Sessa and Leo Woodall in Tony. Photo by Bob Gruen /A24

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He finds work there as a plongeur in a local crab shack run by a never-named chef (Antonio Banderas). He is allowed to sleep on the man’s front-porch hammock, woken each morning by a bucket of cold water thrown over his face. And he lies (or pretends, or believes) that he’s a novelist whose day job is just material for the book he’s writing.

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The result is a propulsive, no-moment-wasted storyline, as Tony runs away from his milquetoast parents and never stops. One thing leads to another so effortlessly that to remove even one page from the screenplay (co-written by Johnson) would be like skipping a course during a prix fixe; you’d be hungry for more.

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Of course, much of it is made up, either by Johnson and company directly, or by Bourdain, whose wildly popular writings about the greasy underbelly of gastronomy were true to the spirit if not to the letter of his life.

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But this allows for some wonderfully creative cinematic moments among Tony’s ragtag collective of coworkers, including Leo Woodall and Stavros Halkias as a couple of sex-and-drug-obsessed fry cooks. (Bourdain himself had issues with substance abuse and took his own life, subjects the film brushes up against with commendable gentleness.)

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This is a movie that knows how to create flavour without overwhelming the viewer. Banderas’s chef character has a mysterious backstory, a religious bent and a few odd quirks such as making his own ketchup and harvesting sea salt that are evocative but (wisely) never fully explained.

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And Tony is the perfect antihero, his rough edges and kick-worthy asinine behaviour smoothed over somewhat by the viewer’s knowledge that he will eventually grow up, after a fashion, and find his true calling. Bon appetit.

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Tony opens across Canada on Aug. 14.

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4 stars out of 5

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