Anthony Bourdain wanted to be a writer before he wanted to be a chef. Tony knows this, opening with a young Bourdain, played by Dominic Sessa, still imagining a literary life before a summer in Provincetown pulls him toward the kitchen. We know, of course, that he will eventually succeed at both. That should give Matt Johnson's film a wonderful bit of dramatic irony: Tony thinks the kitchen is taking him away from writing, while we know it will eventually give him something worth writing about. Tony occasionally gets close to this idea. I wish it stayed there longer.
For much of its runtime, though, Tony is content being a very entertaining biopic. This is not necessarily faint praise. Johnson's sense of humor works for me here in a way it decidedly did not in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, whose comic wavelength I spent most of its runtime trying and failing to tune into. The looseness is better suited to Bourdain's early restaurant world, already populated by strange personalities and petty hierarchies. Johnson doesn't have to manufacture the chaos because the kitchen provides plenty of its own.
The cast understands that tone too. Sessa has the unenviable job of playing someone whose future persona is already sitting fully formed in the audience's head, and wisely avoids doing a Bourdain impression. His Tony is young enough to be pretentious, insecure and occasionally irritating; there are traces of the person we recognize without the sense that he is simply waiting around to become famous. Leo Woodall, meanwhile, is superb as Sal. Woodall continues to be one of those actors who makes me pay more attention whenever he appears, and his performance here gives the kitchen world much of its pull.
That world is clearly what interests Johnson most. You can see why Tony would fall for it: the intensity, the personalities, the sense that this is a place with its own rules and language. As an origin story for Bourdain the chef, it works. But I kept wondering about Bourdain the writer, whose presence in the film feels oddly fleeting given that writing is both where Tony begins and, unbeknownst to him, where all of this will eventually lead.
There is an obvious danger in asking for more. Bourdain was hardly inclined to treat himself as some Great American Writer, and a film that turned 19-year-old Tony into an unrecognized literary genius would be insufferable. I don't need scenes of him scribbling prophetic observations in a notebook while everyone around him fails to recognize his brilliance. If anything, his own irreverence toward that kind of self-importance is part of what made him appealing.
But there is a difference between showing Bourdain as a great writer and showing the qualities that would eventually make him one. His writing had a particular wit and a talent for noticing the absurdities of whatever world he happened to enter. Later, that instinct would take him far beyond restaurants: food became his excuse to talk to people and wander into places he might otherwise never have entered. It is difficult to believe that sensibility simply materialized when Kitchen Confidential was published. Some version of it must already have been walking around Provincetown.
That is the version of Tony I wanted the film to spend more time looking for. The writing ambition appears, recedes and becomes one more piece of biography as the kitchen takes over. Yet because we know what happens next, it carries more weight than that. Here is a young man worrying that writing might be the impractical dream he needs to abandon, while the audience knows that the strange detour he is taking will eventually be the thing that allows him to write something only he could have written.
Johnson's decision to focus on such a narrow period of Bourdain's life is one of Tony's smartest choices. There is no attempt to race through Kitchen Confidential, television, celebrity and everything that followed, and the film is better for it. But narrowing a life this much also creates an opportunity to find something that a cradle-to-grave biopic cannot: a characteristic already present before anyone has reason to think it matters. Tony convincingly shows me how Anthony Bourdain could fall in love with a kitchen. I wanted it to be a little more curious about why this particular kid in this particular kitchen would eventually be able to describe that world so well.
That gap keeps a film I enjoyed from becoming one I loved. Tony is funny, well acted and consistently entertaining, but for all the specificity of the period it depicts, it remains more canonical as a biopic than I expected. The more interesting origin story is there, occasionally peeking through: Bourdain thinks he has stepped away from becoming a writer at precisely the moment he has started becoming one.
Thank you for reading.