Dominic Sessa Summons the Rapscallion Spirit of Anthony Bourdain in the Exhilarating, Tender Tony
· Time
Before the late Anthony Bourdain was a charismatic, adventurous TV personality—and even before he’d become a best-selling writer, with his fantastically disreputable 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential—he was a bright but annoying kid enrolled at Vassar and, as he himself has said, “badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” Matt Johnson’s exhilarating and tender film Tony is only sort-of a biopic: It covers just a few months of Bourdain’s life, the summer of 1975, which he spent sweating away in the kitchen of a small, bustling restaurant in Provincetown. But it’s a captivating origin story, detailing the bumpy rise of a ne’er-do-well who made good, even as he lied, cheated, and partied his way through one gloriously wayward, depraved summer.
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Dominic Sessa—who gave the soulful, bratty performance at the center of Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers—stars as 19-year-old Anthony, only back in 1975, he preferred the breezier, shortened version of his name. After failing to get the writer’s fellowship he’d applied for, he leaves his family’s home in New Jersey and heads to Provincetown, in pursuit of the girl he has a crush on, Emilia Jones’s Nancy. Distraught at learning that she already seems to have a hot boyfriend, he gets drunk at—and is ejected from—a local eatery. But the owner who’d thrown him out—known only as Chef, and played, in a marvelous, multilayered performance by Antonio Banderas—takes pity on him after finding him passed out in the street. Chef allows young Tony to spend a night on his porch, sleeping in a rope hammock. One night stretches out to a whole summer. And for some reason only he can intuit, Chef gives the young rapscallion a job in the kitchen, even though Tony has no restaurant experience and, perhaps worse yet, no kitchen safety training.
Antonio Banderas and Dominic Sessa in Tony —Courtesy of A24This is how Tony, who will eventually become Anthony, falls for the restaurant life: The chaos of the kitchen, the unruly, often drug-addicted personalities, the power to put together meals that people can enjoy with friends, and maybe even remember long after the fact. Sessa is perfect as the swain Bourdain: He’s got that just-fallen-out-of-bed look—perhaps because he literally has just fallen out of bed, or, more accurately, a hammock—but he’s also hungry and inquisitive in a touching way. At first charged with the lowly task of dishwashing, he furtively watches his kitchen colleagues—including Leo Woodall’s Sal, who becomes both a friend and a terrible influence—as they expertly shuck oysters, or slam the lever on a heavy-duty potato slicer as if it were the arm of a slot machine, usually while talking trash about one another. Suddenly, he’s found the place where he belongs. Banderas’ Chef spots Tony’s spark of potential before he does: One of the cardinal rules he’s instituted for his employees is that they must never be even 15 minutes late. To that end, every workday morning he rouses Tony from the snoozy coziness of his hammock with a bucket of water. He doesn’t want this kid to fail, and though Tony has loving, albeit perhaps too permissive, parents (they’re played by Rich Sommer and Dagmara Dominczyk), this is just the kick in the pants he needs.
Johnson—perhaps best known for the 2023 Blackberry, a kind of biopic about the once-ubiquitous, now-quaint pocket device—shapes this material with both breeziness and a kind of tough-love compassion, and the track list he’s assembled summons the spirit of 1975 like a ghost. Whether you were around for that era or not, if Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers' wistful ode to imaginary love “Girlfriend” doesn’t instantly transport you, the Brothers Johnson’s “Strawberry Letter 23” will. Though Tony covers one brief era in the life of an eventually famous person, its overarching power is that it conjures the vibe of wayward summers we may have experienced in our own lives, seemingly endless stretches of time filled with either longing or reckless behavior or both. To quote another Jonathan Richman song: That summer feeling’s gonna haunt you the rest of your life.