Provincetown, MA. It is the summer of 1975 and Tony (Dominic Sessa), fresh off the ferry and reeling from losing out on a fellowship with Vassar College to write the next great American novel is determined to make this small, sea-side town his kingdom; or at the very least convince Nancy (Emilia Jones) to humor him with a date. He drinks his first night away at The Flagship, a small local bar, while he makes his plan of what to do next, but after getting into an altercation with some of the staff, José “Chef” Vatel (Antonio Banderas), the owner, throws the young man out on the street. After the kitchen closes, and Tony is still laying out front of the bar, Chef takes pity on him, brings him home, and in the morning, sets him to work washing dishes in his kitchen. With no other viable prospects, Tony continues to show up day after day, slowly unlocking a passion for the culture of the town and the heritage of cooking.
Matt Johnson directs Tony, a covert biopic which chronicles three formative summers for Anthony Bourdain which, through the magic of cinema have been reduced and intensified to a few crazy weeks. The film, written by Todd Bartels, Lou Howe, and Matthew Miller all sharing credits with Johnson, draws inspiration from the early chapters of Bourdain’s own memoir, “Kitchen Confidential,” published in 2000. Running 106 minutes, A24 skipped the festival circuit, instead platforming it across a steamy summer corridor on over 1,600 domestic screens and counting.
While narratively, the reveal that Sessa’s character is Anthony Bourdain is reserved for the final moments of the film opting instead to call him Tony across the duration, the marketing materials behind the film kept its a thinly veiled secret. To even call it a reveal puts ideation that it was a major twist, but it goes hand in hand with Bourdain’s own likening of himself at that young age; a “.” Johnson is not concerned with Bourdain as a modern legacy in the food world, so it makes sense that he refers to him in shorthad – Tony – and frames the character as someone who views this summer and this dishwashing gig as a mere detour on his way into the literature world. Audiences unfamiliar with Bourdain or the conceit will certainly be able to enjoy the film on its own merits as a coming of age of a bragadocious young man who simultainously knows everything and nothing at the same time.
Centered around Sessa, the young actor reprises some elements of his breakthrough role as Angus in Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers (2023), but he makes himself incredibly vulnerable in front of Michael Bauman‘s lens. With a 1.85:1 frame, he can easily tower over Banderas, but he manages to walk the line maintain the bad boy, devil may care attitude while also showing a meekness in front of the chef. It is as if he is trying to be invisible, to not cause too much of a trouble as to be kicked out of the hammock made up for him on the porch of chef’s beachside bungalow where he is awoken every morning with a pot of chilly ocean water. This is a different kind of cowering that he does when opposite Sal (Leo Woodall), the oyster shucker at The Flagship and a different kind of mentor for Tony; one that introduces him to drugs and helps him give in to his playboy sensibilities. In these scenes, he becomes like a dotting younger brother to Sal, standing just beside and behind him in the frame, shrinking down to accentuate his gangling arms and legs and pushing out whatever kind of frat boy gut he may have so as to look at physically opposite as the slick back blonde haired, broad chest, and gym toned arms which Sal is all too eager to flaunt. These choices, almost certainly arrived at at the crossroads of Sessa’s instincts as an actor and Johnson’s sensibilities as a storyteller, nevertheless go to show that Sessa is one of our finest up and coming performers and that this role will be a true feather in his cap.
While Johnson gives Sessa a lot of responsibility with the material, and allows Woodall to stretch as have fun as, for lack of a better word, the heavy of the film only in so far as his philosophy is so polar opposite that of everyone else’s in the film, it is Banderas who exemplifies the supporting player stealing every scene his graces with his presence. As the chef and owner of the kitchen, he brings a gravitas to the screen that is to be expected, and working alongside a varied ensemble of much younger costars, he is given further advantage to his occupation of the frame, but on the other side of that same coin it opens him up to mostly platonic jabs at his eccentricities. For the most part, these are all good natured jokes even if whispered behind his back, and through Johnson’s surprisingly nuanced script, we learn where the line is when Tony unwittingly crosses it, or when Sal, a hereunto golden boy of the kitchen, more blatantly betrays chef’s trust. In this role, Banderas likewise welcomes us into his kitchen with a similar warmth which he showed to Tony, and we fall into the rhythms of the day along with him in step with the title character as he takes on a more important role in the kitchen. One of the standout scenes in the entire film is a montage on a Monday morning when there is no service, but Chef wakes up Tony at the same time, with the same splash of ocean water, as there is ketchup to be made and sea salt to be distilled. It all echoes forward to Bourdain’s eventual mantra of “use everything, waste nothing,” a principle many chefs and those passionate about food can also relate to, but to see two of these most humble ingredients – salt and tomatoes – being cared for in such a way, and also, to witness the kitchen in these moments of quiet is exactly the reset we need to enter into the third act of the film with along with a reinvigorated Tony. We see the care and the passion in the respite of restaurant, reminiscent yet distinct in its own way to the beautiful ballet that opens Trần Anh Hùng‘s The Taste of Things (2023), and later when the Chef and Tony take to the waves to bring back a fresh catch of striped bass and revel with the other fisherman, we see the passion for community in a more outwardly way. It is these two moments that make the reveal to Tony by Nancy that The Flagship is basically seen by the town as fast food hit like a knife through our chest; a more stunning reveal than the final moments when Tony refers to himself as Anthony Bourdain.
Tony, like many of the covert genre films that have been bubbling up lately, find its weakest moments in its reverence to its tropes, or in this case, its hero. It is not a poorly made film, and the structure of the script and the individual characters and character moments are all genuinely well curated, but the framing of a biopic constantly redirects the momentum of the scene. One of the major instances of this is in how the film handles Woodall’s casual drug use, and to the film’s credit, Johnson really pulls a fast one on us when Sal is alarmingly late to work that next morning, especially after composer Jay McCarrol‘s knowingly mournful piano score over the scene. While this does fold into the narrative a little more broadly, the film is always winking at the audience, expecting them to be in on something while letting those little easter eggs which Bauman’s lens lingers on just a moment too long compared to other insert shots do all the heavy lifting. For those not in the know, it presents more like an amateurish scripting or editing – a job finely done here by Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch – in that is seems like the film is taking time to set something up that is not delivered on. Ultimately, that is not the case, and as presented, Johnson’s film is a strong effort; one that does tell an engaging story, lead by the magnetic Sessa, and plays out like an epic summer hang out film, and hey, like Tony, we might actually learn something along the way, but it could have been a free to explore other more interesting avenues had it not insisted on being a biopic.
