A24’s Anthony Bourdain biopic Tony shines brightest by ignoring fame’s focus
Tony. // Courtesy A24
It’s telling that the Anthony Bourdain of Tony (Dominic Sessa) doesn’t say his full name until the final scene. That’s because Matt Johnson’s film—which condenses anecdotes from Bourdain’s life between the ages of 15 and 25 into a story set over the summer of 1975—knows it’s at its best when you forget it’s about Anthony Bourdain.
Johnson’s portrait of the beloved chef, author and TV host as a “self-destructive and thoughtless young lout” (Bourdain’s own words) is a story about the value of mentorship and its inherent risks and rewards. It’s about how the people we surround ourselves with early in our formation shape who we become, for good and for ill. That Tony is about a real person whose life trajectory viewers already know provides a recognizable illustration of the weight of those early influences on one particular guy.
When we meet Sessa’s Tony, he’s a Vassar student seeking a writing fellowship to bankroll his pretentious novel. His application is understandably rejected, and Tony heads to Provincetown, Mass., where Nancy (Emilia Jones), a girl he has a crush on, is spending the summer. Tony quickly burns through what little cash he has, and ends up crashing on the deck of a man known only as Chef (Antonio Banderas).
A gruff but unfailingly decent guy, Chef takes a chance on his young squatter by giving him a job as a dishwasher at his restaurant. There, Tony befriends the cooks, including charismatic wild man Sal (Leo Woodall), who seems like the effortlessly cool big brother of Tony’s dreams, until his partying goes too far. Sal’s absence leaves Tony to learn from Chef, who teaches the kid to love cooking and, ultimately, the values of responsibility, integrity, and hard work.
As a biopic, Tony can feel overly neat—though thankfully not nearly as neat as most biopics.
Chef and Sal are clearly amalgamations, with Sal particularly feeling less like a person than a representation of the “bad boy chef” tendencies Bourdain exhibited early in his career. Despite this, Woodall still charms the pants off the audience in every scene he’s in, right up to the moment Sal scores some heroin, and Tony watches him shoot up on a beach. The sky turns gray, and the music turns somber as Sessa’s Tony looks on [he’s looking at his FUTURE, see?]
By contrast, Banderas’ Chef is a nuanced portrait of a guy trying to do right by others but not always sure how to. Banderas shows his character’s fortresslike defenses starting to weaken as he and Tony learn from each other, finally opening up just in time for his protege to thoroughly break his heart. It’s a subtle performance that hints at an inner life we only see a portion of, with Banderas leaning into the excellent instincts he’s developed as he’s aged.
Tony. // Courtesy A24
As Tony, Sessa builds on the loneliness and volcanic emotion he brought to The Holdovers (in many ways, Tony could be that movie’s spiritual sequel).
As the filmmaker and actor behind Blackberry and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, Johnson has plenty of experience telling stories about starry-eyed overconfident losers, and he knows exactly the ways this character is his own worst enemy. Sessa’s borrowed swagger, easily deflated ego and lust for adventure speak to those elements, but the youthful vulnerability poking through keeps you from totally hating him. Tony’s not a dick, just a kid who’s formed his identity around all the wrong role models, and the movie knows it.
As a biopic, Tony sometimes leans toward broad strokes, projecting unnecessary melancholy whenever it remembers its subject’s darker aspects and tragic death (Bourdain died by suicide in 2017 at age 61). But as a story about a kid trying to find his place in the world amid warring instincts and conflicting models of masculinity, Tony excels.
As Johnson tells us by waiting until the film’s final seconds to speak the protagonist’s full name, this story could be about anyone. It just happens to be about someone whose name you know.
Tony. // Courtesy A24
