How Anthony Bourdain morphed from compulsive liar to accidental chef

Dominic Sessa and Leo Woodall assess their options in a scene from Matt Johnson’ s “Tony.” — A24 Films

Tony

Starring Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall, Stavros Halkias, Michael Jibrin, Monica Raymund, Rich Sommer, Dagmara Dominczyk, Liam Fitch, Joe Burns and Eric Ripert. Written by Todd Bartels, Lou Howe, Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller. Directed by Matt Johnson. Opens Aug. 14 in Toronto theatres. 106 minutes. STC

⭐️⭐️⭐️ (out of 4)

Peter Howell

Movie Critic

Portrait of the chef as a young shucker: “Tony” is set in the summer of 1975, when celebrity gourmand Anthony Bourdain was 19, and the world wasn’t yet his oyster.

In fact, when the story begins, the lying and louche young Tony — only his mom calls the future author and TV star Anthony at this point — hasn’t yet learned to even crack open a mollusk. The task is one of the many rites of passage in this food-centred chronicle, the engaging new film by Toronto’s Matt Johnson (“BlackBerry,” “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie”).

Played with empathetic-but-annoying appeal by Dominic Sessa, the boarding school firebrand from “The Holdovers,” Tony considers himself a writer of brainy novels, although he has yet to put pen to paper. He’s seen at the outset trying to scam a Vassar College committee into giving him a prestigious literary scholarship. Unprepared, arrogant and clearly bullshitting about his credentials and intentions, he’s soon tossed like the contents of yesterday’s bread basket.

But Tony, who creates his own reality, doesn’t admit defeat to his worried parents (Rich Sommer and Dagmara Dominczyk) or to his high school crush Nancy (Emilia Jones of “CODA”). With vague hopes of romance and a fistful of cash stolen from his dad’s wallet, he follows Nancy to Provincetown, Mass., a boho Cape Cod resort town, where she’s spending the summer making pizzas and enjoying the beach. (Most of the film was actually shot in

Provincetown, which is gorgeously rendered by cinematographer Michael Bauman.)

Thus begins this semi-factual account, loosely drawn from the late Bourdain’s 2000 best-seller, “Kitchen Confidential.” His summer sojourn occurred during “happier, stupider times,” as goes the title of the A24 film’s companion book, before Bourdain’s global fame as an itinerant gourmand.

The stupider part happens immediately. Tony acquires a black eye from a real oyster shucker, Sal (Leo Woodall), after annoying a waitress at the unfancy Flagship seafood resto, which is run by a grizzled but compassionate cook known only as Chef (Antonio Banderas). Seeing something in Tony that nobody else does, Chef gives him a job as a dishwasher and a hammock to sleep in on his porch.

Before you can yell “Cheque, please!”, Tony has befriended horndog Sal, who also works at Flagship, and taken up his coke-snorting ways. Tony is also discovering that far from just passing through the Flagship kitchen, he’s starting to become interested in learning how to shuck and cook without stabbing or burning himself.

Johnson and co-writers Todd Bartels, Lou Howe and Matthew Miller do Bourdain a solid by depicting him not as some kind of Ferris Bueller-style figure of consequence-free mischief. Instead, with Sessa’s thoroughly grounded portrayal, he’s a genuine malcontent who needed the ass-kicking Bourdain wished upon himself, long before he took his own life in 2018 after wrestling with bouts of depression for decades.

Sessa gets some competition for screen magnetism from Woodall, whose charismatic hustler from “The White Lotus” could anchor a film like this all on his own. Less fortunate are Banderas and Jones, whose characters barely rise above caricature in a screenplay that needs more sustenance. Ditto for the soundtrack, which incongruously uses the 1976 disco hit “A Fifth of Beethoven,” a conspicuously on-the-nose musical choice, to enliven a culinary epiphany for

Tony.

Kudos to Johnson, though, for not going full Hollywood with his first Hollywood cast. He’s still fascinated by lively rebels, and, with Anthony Bourdain, he found the perfect subject.