Somewhere between the reality of what has happened and what we believe to be the truth is the story we want to have happened. Every biopic of a widely beloved figure toes the line between hagiography and fan fiction. Tony is no different. It’s both things and it’s something else. There’s no right way to go about it, whether you stick to the facts or strain credulity, either approach has inherent flaws when we examine a life fully lived. Rather than taking the cradle-to-grave approach, Tony opts for capturing a season of Anthony Bourdain’s life. The film captures Bourdain’s time in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he arrived with a literary imagination in pursuit of love and found it not in the young woman he was chasing after, but in a lobster kitchen where he experienced a cultural and culinary awakening.
For Bourdain, food served as a concrete metaphor. Food creates a connection and tells a story. The story is about the people who made it and everything they’ve done. It’s their season of life presented in a lobster basket. Tony represents this philosophy cinematically, wherein cinema captures the same concepts.
Director Matt Johnson (Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie) searches for the impetuous of everything expressed in Anthony Bourdain’s books and shows with reverence but not quite idolization. The journey is the idea, as Tony (Dominic Sessa, as an affected caricature) follows his high school crush Nancy (Emilia Jones, endearingly flighty) to Provincetown and rather than finding the love story he was looking for, encounters her already taken, and falls in with a kitchen of playful rogues, headed by a Chef who would change his life (Antonio Banderas, in an exceptional, deeply-drawn supporting role).
Bourdain’s Cape Cod summer plays like a remembered fever dream of a rough-around-the-edges kitchen where he grew from boy to man, by learning that food is the ultimate gateway between cultures and people. The film lives in the traits expressed in Bourdain’s books and shows and if not on-the-nose in developing some of his idiosyncrasies in language and lived experience, evokes those concepts neatly and with examined, well-formed summertime textures.
This approach pays off well for Johnson, who is interested in biography (also see: BlackBerry, 2023) and searches for meaning in his stories. Anthony Bourdain comes with a lot more expectation and audience attachment than the story of creating a phone with a nice keyboard but Johnson manages, while portraying one of the most curious and generously open figures in culinary imagination.
Whereas Tony gets the drama right and creates meaningful expressions about what it means to work in a kitchen, its focus on “the origin story” of the Bourdain who later arrived in our bookstores and on tv, that point which served as the impetus for those events to happen, does come across as a convenient cinematic construction, which just barely dodges the interest points of Bourdain which we have more parasocially engaged with through other, recorded media.
Still, the film captures food as a means of communication and understands Bourdain with empathy but also clear-eyed awareness that success often comes from a series of mistakes and hard-learned lessons which precede self-actualization. As we already have an astounding documentary — Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021, excellent apart from one ethical issue with AI being used to read Bourdain’s letters) — Johnson helps to offer a more complete picture of Bourdain for the cinema. It’s vital to our understanding of Bourdain, having some posthumous representation also builds upon the legacy, and offers us a generous slice of life that has been missing on-screen.