Tony

“Tony” begins with a quote from the late author and chef Anthony Bourdain describing himself at age 19: “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” Add in depressed, arrogant, angry, terrified, and desperately crushing on a girl he has no possible capacity to attract, and you’ve got the anti-hero in this, I have to say, delicious new film about a pivotal summer when Bourdain was 19.

Dominic Sessa (“The Holdovers“) gives one of the best performances of the year as Bourdain, still called “Tony.” As the film opens, he is explaining with great confidence but very little substance to an academic committee why he should receive a writing grant for the summer. He is so certain his proposal cannot lose that he tells everyone, including his family, that he has won it. But he has not. With no money, no plans, and no idea what to do, he decides to follow a girl who has shown pretty definitively that she is even less impressed with him than the committee. She mentioned she was spending the summer in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, so that is where he goes, with no job, no place to say, and very soon, no money.

I really appreciate the new style of biographical films that pick one pitival moment instead of trying to cram an entire lifetime into two hours, skipping from some trauma in childhood to meeting a series of significant people to being discovered to letting down people who care about him, etc. etc. Here, Sessa keeps us on the side of Bourdain, still being called by the diminutive “Tony,” behaving very badly, making many mistakes, hurting other people, but, in truly thrilling fashion, getting a glimpse of a future where he will become fully himself, fully “Anthony.”

Screenwriters Todd Bartels, Lou Howe, Matthew Miller, and dirctor Matt Johnson sensitively adapted from just a few dozen pages in Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, capturing the reality of the emotions and reactions instead of being overly didactic about the details. This means that three years are encapsulated into one summer and the characters other than Bourdin are composites adjusted for dramatic purposes. In the film and in reality Bourdin worked at a low-end Provincetown restaurant called The Flagship. In the movie, he gets drunk, insults the waitress, gets thrown out, and gets robbed. Then the owner (Anonthy Banderas as Chef) takes pity on him, and lets him sleep on his hammock — waking him up every morning by throwing cold ocean water on his head, and then gives him a dishwashing job in his kitchen. It is unlikely any of that really happened.

But that set-up is just a way of making palpable what is going on internally. Leo Woodall, fast becoming one of the most sought-after actors in Hollywood, gives another outstanding performance as Sal, the louche, amoral sous-chef who carves a chip out of the doorway every time he has sex with a woman so he can keep them as souvenirs of his conquests. Chef is someone the Bourdin we meet at the beginning of the film would have dismissed as simple and uninteresting. But like a cartoon character with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, Sal and Chef present two choices that Bourdin will continue to struggle with until his sad death at his own hand in 2018. It is a tribute to the screenwriters and the performers that the film hits the usual notes of a three-act coming of age story and yet every minute is fresh and specific. So it is fitting that the movie ends with one of Bourdain’s real-life friends from the restaurant world, Eric Ripert, playing an instructor at the Culinary Institute of America. We know what happens next. But the part of Bourdain’s story he dismissed in his book as “the less said about that part of my life, the better, believe me,” makes a very fine film.

Parents should know that this film has a lot of adult material and bad behavior including nudity and sexual references and situations, alcohol and drugs used casually and to excess, and very strong language.

Family discussion: How did Tony’s ideas about what he needed to be happy change over the course of the summer? Why? What food tastes like the future to you? If not food, what does feel like future to you?

If you like this, try: Bourdain’s books and television series and “Julie & Julia”