Tony takes us to the 1970s, before Anthony Bourdain quite literally became Anthony Bourdain. Dominic Sessa portrays our titular Tony (in his first leading role since his wonderful discovery in The Holdovers) during one formative summer in which a cavalcade of lies—which he seems to tell based more on instinct than intention—results in him finding his passion for the seedy, dark underbelly of the culinary world.
A writer in name only, Tony finds himself among a group of chefs at the long-gone Flagship restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where the majority of the film takes place. Most memorable are Stavros Halkias (funny as ever) and Leo Woodall (sexy as ever), who get very little to do in the grand scheme of things. This is a story about a singular figure, and the film suffers from keeping its focus a bit too narrow, reducing Tony’s peers to funny quips and convenient plot devices.
Antonio Banderas is the patriarch—the head chef and owner of the Flagship who, for unexplored reasons, has given up a prestigious career at Michelin-starred restaurants for a slower pace of life in Provincetown. We can surmise why one might make this choice, but I’d be lying if I didn’t wish the film seemed more interested in exploring it. What we get instead is an excellent biopic that smartly refuses to bite off more than it can chew, telling us just one small but pivotal story in Bourdain’s storied life.
And this story is exhilarating, in the way only something this absurd could possibly be real. Tony struts around like he’s a man when he’s still so obviously a boy (with nunchucks, no less), getting the shit beaten out of him more times than you can count, through every fault of his own. He’s a lost soul who thinks he’s found his calling but doesn’t realize how far away he still is from it.
Chasing a girl to Provincetown after failing to receive a writing fellowship—a fact he can hardly utter out loud, let alone admit to himself—he fails his way into a job as a dishwasher, sleeping on Chef’s hammock and waking every day to a bucket of seawater in the face.
This tough love is exactly what he needs. He doesn’t realize it yet—but these are his people, as much as he may end up fighting it. Tony is a fuck-up. He lies. He cheats. He can’t help but sneak around and withdraw, leaving a wake of destruction in his path. It doesn’t matter. This is his journey, and even his redemption is clouded by the pull of his narcissistic tendencies. As I suspect Bourdain himself would have liked, this is not a character who is easy to root for. Every moment that feels redemptive is paired with harm and another pull toward destruction. This is what makes the film so interesting while also making it equally frustrating.
Tony wants you to root for him, and this comes together especially sloppily in the third act. Tony gets the girl. He gets into the CIA. He finds himself over the course of one excruciating summer. And while the film does give us a glimpse of the man behind the idol, it hinders itself by biasing the story toward the idealized version instead of the authentic one. Like I said, it’s compelling. The backdrop of Provincetown, this little village at the tip of Cape Cod, is magical and transformative, and the film uses its locale exquisitely, filming at many hot spots that still exist today—none featured more prominently than the iconic Spiritus Pizza. But the film loses itself in this idealization, with far too many close-ups of Dominic Sessa’s capital-A Acting and a script that does not quite know how to dock the boat.
This is most apparent in an eye-roll of a final line in which Tony explicitly transforms into Anthony, completing his character arc without trusting the audience to wrestle with the complicated boy turned man. Matt Johnson is a great director (see the masterpiece that is Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie or BlackBerry), so I am only this harsh because Tony does not quite live up to his other work. For fans of Bourdain, I would call this a necessary watch. For everyone else, I’d argue your time is better spent with the hundreds of hours Bourdain himself left behind for all of us.