‘Tony’ Prime Video Review: Dominic Sessa and Antonio Banderas Shine in a Rough-Edged Portrait of Anthony Bourdain as a Cocky Teenager

A Building’s roman,” Tony says he’s planning to write. “A metaphorical conversation between George Orwell and Jack Kerouac,” he adds. “On a papyrus,” he concludes. The young Anthony Bourdain is applying for a fellowship for aspiring writers and pitches his project to three Vassar professors, who stare at him without saying a word. He’s convinced he’s getting it until his mother, Gladys (Dagmara Domińczyk), points out that “building’s roman” isn’t actually a term and that the word is Bildungsroman, a German word roughly translated as coming-of-age. “I hope you didn’t put it that way on your application,” she tells him, laughing.

In just a couple of scenes, Tony lays out several of its central ideas. It’s clear that Bourdain (Dominic Sessa, the breakout star of The Holdovers, by Alexander Payne) is a cocky, somewhat pretentious 19-year-old who dreams of becoming a writer and considers himself intellectually superior to most of his peers. It’s also clear that his family —his journalist mother in particular— is highly critical and demanding of him. And, in the process, director Matt Johnson announces what we’re watching: a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story about the beginnings of the transformation of this insufferably precocious young man into the famous chef, writer and television host Anthony Bourdain.

What’s missing, of course, is the primary motivation, the narrative engine that—especially back then—seemed to drive the world, particularly the male half of it: getting the girl. Tony has been knocked sideways by a reunion with Nancy (Emilia Jones), a former high school classmate he had a crush on, and he wants to impress her. She, however, isn’t particularly interested. When Tony learns that he didn’t get the fellowship he was counting on, he lies to his family and heads off on his own to Provincetown, Rhode Island, a beach resort town where he’s been told Nancy is living. Once he gets there, everything goes wrong: he discovers that she has a boyfriend, gets drunk at a bar, gets the crap beaten out of him and has his money stolen.

After finding him sprawled on the floor for hours, the head chef and owner of a restaurant called The Flagship, Chef José (Antonio Banderas), takes pity on him, brings him home and lets him sleep in a hammock on the porch. From that point on, Chef —as everyone calls him; whether his ancestry is Spanish, Portuguese or Brazilian is part of the joke— will give Tony a culinary education modeled loosely on the Karate Kid movies, except that the dojo is a restaurant kitchen. He wakes him up by throwing a bucket of cold water on him, puts him to work doing the restaurant’s most miserable jobs and figures that, in addition to teaching him a thing or two, the kid can earn his keep by sleeping outside in that hammock. Tony, for his part, has very little interest in learning his way around a kitchen. He wants Nancy to notice him and to keep up the charade that he’s a writer working on his novel.

Tony takes place in the summer of 1975 and is based on stories Bourdain recounted in his bestselling 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential. The film is interested in the characters, misadventures, disappointments, joys and heartbreaks that would help shape the man he would eventually become. That summer on the Cape, working himself to the bone in the chaotic restaurant, is also defined by Sal (Leo Woodall), a more experienced member of the kitchen crew who becomes one of those troublesome friends whose intensity is both seductive and dangerous. If Sal is the “bad influence” —the “sin eater,” as Chef eventually calls him— Banderas’ character is the sensei: the tough teacher whose lessons are painful to endure in the present but whose value becomes clear years later.

With an extraordinary soundtrack packed with music from the period —including Thin Lizzy, Faces, War, The Stooges, Brian Eno, Karen Dalton and… Leonardo Favio—, Tony is a loving tribute to Bourdain that remains, for most of its running time, faithful to the author’s irreverent, straight-ahead spirit. It uses the conventions of the coming-of-age movie without sacrificing a healthy dose of realism. The volatile camaraderie in the kitchen, Tony’s late-night adventures and his not particularly appealing personality —he’s a compulsive liar— give the film a rougher edge than most movies in the genre. That has a lot to do with the choice of Canadian filmmaker Johnson (Operation Avalanche, BlackBerry), a director accustomed to working in that register and with characters who tend to make audiences a little uncomfortable.

That’s why the film’s final stretch —its resolution, if you will— feels somewhat phony, as though a producer or studio executive decided that the movie needed a more conventional and reassuring ending than the one it had been building toward. Aside from that understandable misstep, Tony is a very good movie, and Johnson proves that he can handle a project with a somewhat more commercial sensibility than his previous films. Sessa is one of the most talented actors of his generation, and the role of the lovable troublemaker fits him like a glove. Woodall is better than ever as a rough-edged, charismatic character straight out of the James Dean school of life. And Banderas gets to shine in one of the most appealing roles he has had in an American movie.

Bourdain would probably have liked the movie. Maybe he would have complained that the dessert didn’t quite live up to the rest of the meal —perhaps a little too sweet— but he would have recommended this particular “restaurant” run by Matt Johnson.