Director Matt Johnson’s surprisingly solid Anthony Bourdain biopic “Tony” begins with a typically self-deprecating quote from the superstar chef’s bestselling memoir, “Kitchen Confidential.” Before we see a frame of film, Bourdain admits in his own words: “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” It’s the equivalent of writing a permission slip for the arrogant and deeply condescending character depicted onscreen. We in the audience are inclined to let him get away with a lot more than we otherwise might have, because we know he’s going to be embarrassed about all this when he grows up to be Anthony Bourdain. The movie is the ass-kicking. And it’s a good one.
Compressing the several summers a young Bourdain spent working kitchens in Provincetown into an extremely eventful three-month stretch, “Tony” is a mostly made-up mishmash of coming-of-age cliches so self-aware that an early scene actually has the protagonist explaining what a bildungsroman is. Director Johnson, who penned the screenplay with Todd Bartels, Lou Howe and regular writing partner Matthew Miller, shrewdly deploys familiar Hollywood formulas so we can see every set-up and welcome every payoff. They’re cooking up comfort food, and “Tony” delivers. It’s Bourdain’s “A Complete Unknown,” or as I’ve been describing it to people, probably the least-embarrassing version of this movie that they could have made. It also helps that it’s hilarious.
Dominic Sessa stars as the prickly, wannabe writer, who’s knocked off his high horse when he loses a summer fellowship at Vassar after pitching a faux-Kerouac riff he clearly hasn’t thought through. Humbled, he chases his dreamgirl (Emilia Jones) to P-Town, where he promptly gets rolled and finds himself washing dishes at a seafood shack, crashing in the porch hammock of the restaurant’s cagey, no-nonsense owner (Antonio Banderas, wonderful). It’s there that young Tony is initiated into the alpha underworld of kitchen camaraderie, where badly behaved men are very good at their jobs, hazing their new recruit with glorious arias of profanity amid superhuman feats of substance abuse and Rabelaisian after-hours sexual adventures. Yet somehow everyone still manages to show up for work the next morning, even if they’re discreetly vomiting into a garbage can.
The dangerous allure of this life is embodied by Leo Woodall’s Sal, a hellraising oyster shucker whose smoldering charisma all but burns a hole in the movie. I’ll confess to not really noticing the actor in “Nuremberg” or “The White Lotus,” but Woodall was incredibly magnetic in this past spring’s “Tuner,” playing a piano prodigy with a hearing disability in a crime picture that boasted performances much stronger than its screenplay. He’s the breakout star of “Tony,” making vile obscenities sound like terms of endearment and walking into every room like he owns the place. Funny and warm until he’s frighteningly not, Woodall is playing a very specific kind of hard-partying guy you’ve probably known if you’ve kicked around these sorts of scenes. There’s a nonzero chance something violent and bad will happen when you’re hanging out with him, but if it doesn’t, you’re going to come home with stories you’ll be telling your grandkids.
Sal is the devil on young Tony’s shoulder, showing him the ropes of this exotic new world and trying to help the hapless, lovestruck kid score chicks. The angel on his other shoulder is Banderas’ wizened chef, who runs the kitchen with great patience and testy wisdom, so aloof that not even his longtime employees know his real name. Banderas has grown into such a graceful performer, the aging hunk carrying with him a gorgeously lived-in gravitas these days. He sees something in this surly dishwasher, taking Tony under his wing and introducing our snot-nosed brat to the rewards of hard work done right, showing him how to find peace in a well-prepared meal. This all could have been awfully corny, but Johnson and the actors treat the revelations off-handedly. Sessa’s performance is especially subtle in this regard, his eyes slowly widening to take in a world beyond his petulant egomania.
Apparently the go-to guy for Massachusetts-set 1970s period pieces, Sessa proves that the promise he showed in “The Holdovers” was no fluke. He’s not doing a Bourdain imitation per se, but occasionally slips into the sardonic baritone we know so well. It helps that the young actor looks like he’s time-traveled here directly from the “Me Decade,” as the rest of the picture is pretty loose about anachronistic hairstyles and slang. (The characters may go see “Jaws” at the Wellfleet Drive-in, but Woodall’s tattoos couldn’t be more 2026.) Director Johnson previously helmed the terrific cautionary tech tale “BlackBerry,” an inverted “Social Network” and probably the best of that weird blip in 2023 when Hollywood got really into making movies about products instead of people, telling stories of Air Jordans, Tetris and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.
Like the character himself, “Tony” has no idea what to do with women. The scenes with Jones are the movie’s worst, unable to see her as anything beyond a motivational force for the protagonist. Though obviously attractive, Jones isn’t strong enough a screen presence for us to buy such a thinly written character’s hold over Tony. (Woodall’s Sal shares the audience’s confusion in one of the movie’s most unprintable queries.) In real life, Bourdain went to Provincetown with his future wife Nancy, but this picture has very little to do with what actually happened, as anyone who has seen the “Massachusetts” episode of “Parts Unknown” can tell you. Yet unlike Morgan Neville’s sleazy 2021 documentary “Roadrunner,” this film works as well as it does because Johnson and company understand the idea of Anthony Bourdain, and why he meant so much to so many of us.
It’s a movie about running away to find yourself. It’s about winding up in an unfamiliar place, looking around to appreciate the people there and learning about their customs. That’s every Bourdain show in a nutshell, so “Tony” serves as both an origin story and a pilot episode. There are hints of the tragedies we know lie ahead: brief encounters with heroin and discussions of suicide. But this is the bildungsroman the character pompously promised his advisors at Vassar. It’s about a troubled young man’s journey to where, however briefly, he belongs.
“Tony” opens in theaters on Thursday, Aug. 13
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