Tony

“It’s going to be a bildungsroman…” Tony (Dominic Sessa) announces at the dinner table “… a coming-of-age novel.” He’s talking about a novel he has pitched at a prestigious scholarship interview. His father (Rich Sommers) is excited, his mother (Dagmara Dominczyk) is more circumspect. He’s almost certain he will be chosen for the scholarship, after which he will embark on his journey to be what he already believes is a crucial part of his identity. “I’m a writer,” our 19-year-old protagonist says while introducing himself at a bar in an earlier scene. As we all know now, the debut novel (Kitchen Confidential) would only arrive 25 years later. Before Anthony Bourdain became a renowned chef and a worldwide phenomenon – he was just a kid. An arrogant, entitled, insufferable young man, who thought the world owed him a stage to showcase his brilliance. He was also an incessant and effortless liar. In Matt Johnson’s film, we meet Bourdain when he’s – as the title suggests – Tony, and follow him over an eventful summer. His mother calls him Anthony, which the rebel can’t stand. Hence, he goes out of his way to ask people to not call him that.

Before Anthony Bourdain became the chef, author and TV host who taught an audience to eat, travel and look at the world with curiosity, he was Tony, a 19-year-old who didn’t quite know what to do with himself. “I was—to be frank—a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” Bourdain wrote of himself in Kitchen Confidential, his 2000 memoir. It is an unusually unsparing assessment, and very much the man we meet in director Matt Johnson’s coming-of-age film about the young Bourdain. Johnson and his co-writers Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe take their ideas and inspiration from early chapters of the bestselling Kitchen Confidential, particularly Bourdain’s experiences in Provincetown, while taking cinematic liberties to shape it into a comic drama. Tony is less interested in recreating a life than in capturing a formative moment.

In 2013, five years before he died by suicide, Anthony Bourdain did a Reddit AMA session. To a question of “What kind of person were you in your twenties?” he replied, in his trademark, staccato, punch-in-the-gut style: “I was a complete asshole. Selfish, larcenous, druggy, loud, stupid, insensitive and someone you would not want to have known. I would have robbed your medicine cabinet had I been invited to your house.” In a contrast to this, for devotees of Bourdain’s no-bullshit, tough guy, masculine mythmaking, the Anthony of Tony can seem timid. He can’t mumble a retort in front of his demanding mother. The only punch he pulls is through a Bruce Lee poster on a wall. But then this is far before his celebrity chef, lunching-with-the-President days. This is an origin story.

In his memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Anthony Bourdain writes, “Good food very often, even most often, is simple food.” From what we know of what followed in that celebrity chef and writer’s life, and all that has been spilling out lately from the closets of famous restaurants plus successful TV shows (The Bear), kitchens are anything but simple. Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson, who has also co-written Tony, takes Bourdain’s advice – telling simply the story of a not-too-complex young man figuring out his way in the world. And who, but for one black eye and bucketfuls of water poured down on him to wake him up every morning, doesn’t have it all that bad.