“Tony,” the Anthony Bourdain biopic, is a coming-of-age tale for a modern culinary giant. Set over just a summer, it’s also clearly an appetizer. And like all first courses, it leaves you with a nice first taste — but still hungry.
Director and co-writer Matt Johnson has frustratingly taken liberties with a formative period in Bourdain’s life, but still only manages to tell the story of how a callow lad became somewhat of a less callow lad after toiling in a restaurant kitchen on Cape Cod in 1975.
In “Tony,” the world-weary, forever romantic, noodle-slurping Bourdain that we would fall in love with decades later via travel shows like “Parts Unknown” stays firmly out of grasp. What’s perhaps most frustrating is that this could have been a fine movie without Bourdain at its center at all. Who doesn’t like a good coming of age? Why did it have to be Bourdain if Bourdain never gets to be Bourdain?
Dominic Sessa plays the teenage chef-traveler as an angular misfit, his tall frame hunched, peering at people through a mop of unruly curls, his chin forever jutted downward — a surly Bob Dylan in kitchen whites. We rarely see moments of joy flash on his face, even for lust or food. He never unlocks. Even a beautifully documented moment in Bourdain’s life — when the sea that summer was filled with stripers, triggering a mass fishing frenzy at night — doesn’t trigger awe.
Bourdain spent two chapters talking about this time in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in his star-making 2000 memoir, “Kitchen Confidential,” and he would return in TV episodes of “A Cook’s Tour” and “Parts Unknown.” It was certainly an important time in the young Bourdain’s life, but hang too much on it and the hanger apparently collapses.
The new movie opens with a quote from “Kitchen Confidential”: “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” He got that as he went from dishwasher to plating shrimp cocktails and learning the insult-based, testosterone-filled ways of the kitchen.
Bourdain would develop two love affairs during this fateful summer: One, a delight for the kitchen — the pressure, the camaraderie, the artist’s heart, the pirate’s adoration of heat and knives — and, another, hard drugs. “This is where I bought my first bag of heroin,” he says in “Parts Unknown.” But, like a collapsing soufflé, it fails at that first task — never showing us how this wannabe writer with a Velcro wallet in a Stooges T-shirt pivoted to become a global culinary raconteur. And it never depicts Bourdain’s own heroin use.
Johnson, who co-wrote the screenplay with Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, heightens what should be a small, beautiful awakening by crafting a completely new culinary mentor for Bourdain and adding showy references to 17th-century chef François Vatel and 18th- and 19th-century “sin eaters.” Did we need a devastating, Hollywood action movielike kitchen fire here? No. You can almost feel the filmmakers try to argue for a car chase.
Antonio Banderas steps into the role of the mentor, but it’s a fuzzy image. His character is spiritual, punctual and deeply religious, yet silently overseeing a very misogynistic, racist and drug-addled workforce. Our film’s Bourdain will inspire him to reach higher by adding a lobster thermidor to the menu, one of those tired devices by which the mentee becomes the mentor. (The gorgeous Banderas fails to fully capture the book’s mentor with a “gin-blossomed face” and “boozer’s gut.”)
What’s most frustrating is we never feel Bourdain’s muse come alive. He doesn’t, over the course of more than 100 minutes, become an evangelist for cuisine or its power to heal, celebrate and embrace. He acknowledges — from “Kitchen Confidential,” in a childhood chapter — that oysters tasted “of the future” — but the rat in “Ratatouille” had better passion.
There are lovely moments, like when shucked oysters are used to flirt or when chef Eric Ripert, a longtime friend of Bourdain, makes a cameo, or whenever actor Emilia Jones as Bourdain’s love interest appears. Leo Woodall also does a fantastic turn as Bourdain’s kitchen and drug pal, Sal.
Focusing on a slice of time from a cultural icon — most recently done for The Boss in “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” — is a now-savvy alternative to the cradle-to-grave biopic. But “Tony” fails as an origin story. The cook is off.
“Tony,” an A24 release that debuts in theaters in Los Angeles and New York on Aug. 7 and expands on Aug. 21, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “pervasive language, drug use and sexual content/nudity.” Running time: 106 minutes. Two stars out of four.
