“I was, to be frank, a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”
That is how Anthony Bourdain described himself at 19 years of age in Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, his 2000 memoir about the hidden world of professional kitchens and the experiences that shaped him as a chef and writer. The book became significant not only because it exposed the brutality, camaraderie, drug culture and dark humour of restaurant life, but because it transformed Bourdain from a respected chef into a major literary and cultural figure. Its success also paved the way for his later television career, establishing the candid, irreverent voice that would define his work. It is an unusually perfect epigraph for Tony.
Matt Johnson’s coming-of-age film does not begin with the Anthony Bourdain the world came to know; the trench-coated, cigarette-smoking, globe-trotting culinary icon who could make a plate of street food feel like a portal into an entire culture. It begins with Tony: arrogant, directionless, horny, dishonest and, quite frankly, a little insufferable. It's the only sensible place to start a film that has no interest in Bourdain the icon, only in Bourdain the mess.
Tony is not a cradle-to-grave biopic, and it is better for it. Johnson — who previously turned a Canadian smartphone company into gripping cinema with BlackBerry — picks a single, barely-documented summer: that of 1975 in Cape Cod, before the fame, before Kitchen Confidential, before Parts Unknown.
Set over the summer, Tony narrows its gaze to the period when a young Bourdain was still trying to convince himself and everyone around him that he was destined to become a writer. After failing to secure a writing fellowship at Vassar, he lies to his family about getting it. He then follows Nancy (Emilia Jones), an old crush, to Provincetown, ostensibly in pursuit of romance and adventure. What he finds instead is a dishwashing job at a seafood restaurant and the first real glimpse of a life he had not planned for.
It's a coming-of-age story with almost nothing coming of age about it in the conventional sense; Tony spends most of the film getting things wrong. He gets drunk, hits on a bartender, gets thrown out. The shack's owner chef, played by Antonio Banderas takes him in for the night instead of turning him out, and that single act of decency becomes the hinge the entire film swings on. It is a smart choice to make this one summer the entire canvas. Bourdain’s later life has been documented, discussed and dissected endlessly. His addictions, literary success, television career, friendships and tragic death have all become part of the mythology surrounding him. Johnson wisely refuses to cram all of that into 106 minutes; instead, Tony goes looking for the person before the persona.
Dominic Sessa, following his breakout performance in The Holdovers, plays Tony with great bravado and vulnerability. He lies casually and makes spectacularly bad decisions. Yet, Sessa allows flashes of the curiosity and sensitivity that will eventually become central to Bourdain’s identity. The performance is less an impersonation than an excavation of the person underneath the legend. But the performance to remember would be hands down Antonio Banderas as the chef of Flagship, where Tony spent his summer that changed everything for him. Banderas' chef is not a conventional movie mentor dispensing neat life lessons; he is intimidating, mercurial and occasionally tender, a man who understands that the kitchen can be both a brutal workplace and a place where a lost young person can discover discipline. Their relationship becomes the emotional spine of the film. Chef does not turn Tony into a chef overnight; he teaches him how to show up, work, listen and earn his place.
The kitchen, meanwhile, becomes its own character. Tony is exposed to the hierarchy, camaraderie, vulgarity and exhaustion of restaurant life, but also to the drug culture that accompanies it. When Tony is hired on as the shack's dishwasher, the kitchen crew renames him "Flacko" and the film settles into its real subject: not romance, but apprenticeship. Some of that education comes from bad company — Leo Woodall plays Sal, a grimy, drug-abusing line cook who's the film's designated bad influence. However, the film does not romanticise this world entirely, nor does he turn it into the trauma factory of something like The Bear.
But ultimately, what makes Tony work is what it doesn't do. This is an anti-hero-to-hero arc that redeems its subject in a third-act montage. Tony doesn't become a better person by the time the credits roll, he just becomes a slightly more kind one, and the film trusts that distinction to matter. You don't need to know a single Bourdain fact walking in. That, more than anything, is the mark of a biopic that's actually working. It's a story about becoming, not a highlight reel of who someone eventually was.
And becoming, in Tony, is less about finding a vocation than learning how to see beyond yourself. Tony arrives in Provincetown convinced that he is destined to be a writer, but without much evidence that he is willing to do the work required to become one. The kitchen gives him something his writing ambitions never had: consequences. You either show up, learn the rhythm, take the abuse and get better, or you leave.
There is a lovely irony to the fact that the young Bourdain's great literary ambition is eventually redirected through food; the writer in him never disappears. If anything, the kitchen gives him the material, language and perspective he was missing. The future Bourdain who would write about restaurants, travel the world and turn strangers into protagonists is already visible here, just not in the form we expect. He is learning how to listen.
Filmmaker Johnson's choice to keep the story a slither into his life makes that realisation land harder. There is no need for the film to rush towards Kitchen Confidential, No Reservations or Parts Unknown. The audience already knows what Tony will become. The interesting question is what this particular young man had to go through all of this to get there.
And then there is the name.
Tony mentions in passing that his mother prefers calling him "Anthony" because it sounds more like a man's name. Tony, meanwhile, prefers the shorter, less formal version. It becomes another marker of the identity he is trying on. Tony is the young man who thinks he has himself figured out; Anthony is the person he has not yet grown into.
So when he arrives at the Culinary Institute of America and is asked his full name, the answer carries considerably more weight.
“Anthony Bourdain.”
It is the final dialogue of the film, and a deceptively simple full stop, where the film comes full circle.
The final surprise is Eric Ripert, Bourdain's longtime friend and fellow chef, appearing as one of the interviewers at the Culinary Institute. On its own, it is a small cameo. But for anyone who knows Bourdain, it is a genuinely surprising and moving moment. Ripert was one of the people who knew the man Tony would become, and seeing him there at the moment that journey is beginning creates a bridge between the young man on screen and the life the audience already knows.
Tony understands that becoming the person you are meant to be is rarely one grand revelation. Sometimes it is a succession of hard lessons, humiliations, unlikely mentors and wrong turns. For Bourdain, one of those turns happened in Provincetown in the summer of 1975. The film is not so much about the making of a legend, but the making of a person and the beautiful, messy truth that sometimes you have to get lost before you find your true calling.