REEL | 'Tony' (the Chef the Book the Movie) Tracks A Young Bourdain

"They taste like the future."

A24 Films

Toronto native Matt Johnson directs Dominic Sessa as the beloved chef, bestselling author, and travel host Anthony Bourdain in Tony, based on his formative experiences working at a Cape Cod seafood restaurant during the summer of 1975. As outlined in the memorable early chapters of his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, the film tracks the angry young cook longing to become a "writer" (whatever that means) without having written anything or really experienced life at all at age nineteen.

Set in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the cast is well drawn out with characters like Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall, and Antonio Banderas as the love interest, degenerate coworker, and soulful chef mentor. There are flavours of 1970s nostalgia mixed with our loose familiarity with Bourdain's troubled young adulthood. Johnson confines the film purely to one formative moment in time as an almost self-delusion of working and learning in a kitchen.

From a screenplay initially written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe before being rewritten by the Canadian producing duo of Matthew Miller and Johnson, it fits the familiar beats of coming-of-age origin stories while refraining from making too much of a myth of someone not famous yet. Tony does its best to resist pretension, presenting itself as the first chapter of a bittersweet tale of a scoundrel reluctantly becoming a man.

Tony makes a cozy meal out of the colossal young asshole who still had a long way to go to becoming the Anthony Bourdain everyone came to know and admire. Before he was a world traveller, world-class chef, and documentarian, he was an aspiring writer with nothing to write about. As far as unconventional biopics go, this is probably the preferred way to remember a great man who did more than anyone to refute his own greatness.


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