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

"But I like you. You're the sin eater."

A24 / Amazon MGM Studios

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 real "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, with Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall, and Antonio Banderas as the love interest, degenerate co-worker, and soulful chef mentor. The film blends 1970s nostalgia with our loose familiarity with Bourdain's troubled young adulthood. Johnson confines the film to one formative moment in time, an almost self-delusion of working and learning in a kitchen.

Originally written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe before being rewritten by Canadian producers Matthew Miller and Johnson, the screenplay follows the familiar beats of a coming-of-age origin story while avoiding too much myth-making around someone not yet famous. Tony does its best to resist pretension, presenting itself as the first chapter of a bittersweet tale of a scoundrel reluctantly becoming a man worth following.

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-class chef, international traveller, 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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