Antonio Banderas (left), plays Chef alongside Dominic Sessa, who stars as a young Bourdain.Seacia Pavao/A24
Tony
Directed by Matt Johnson
Written by Todd Bartels, Lou Howe, Matthew Miller and Matt Johnson
Starring Dominic Sessa, Emilia Jones and Antonio Banderas
Classification N/A; 106 minutes
Opens in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver Aug. 14 before expanding across Canada Aug. 21
Critic’s Pick
Tony, the wonderful new biopic about the early days of chef and author Anthony Bourdain from Canadian director Matt Johnson, is bookended by scenes in which the title character is subjected to interviews by committee. At the film’s beginning, a 19-year-old Tony (Dominic Sessa) is all uninformed bluster and obnoxious bravado, convinced that he is smarter and more clever than the Vassar professors auditioning him for a prestigious literary grant. By the film’s end – no spoilers here, don’t worry – the script has been gently flipped, the portrait of the artist as a humbled young man (mostly) complete.
Watching the film the other week, it was difficult to not imagine Johnson using the film’s tidy narrative structure to exorcise some of his own demons when it comes to the director’s favoured themes of rebellion, access and the transcendent power of youthful cockiness. Is that a teenage Bourdain all-too-confidently arguing that his academic elders have no idea what true art is? Or is it a young Johnson spitting fire in front of an out-of-touch committee from Telefilm Canada, its gatekeepers reluctant to fund his early idea for what would become Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie?
Sessa, left, with Leo Woodall, delivers a tremendous lead performance in the title role.Seacia Pavao/A24
Just as Tony (the man) grows up and learns to use failure as a launching pad for something greater, Tony (the movie) displays the maturing work of a filmmaker reckoning with the winding, brash, mistake-laden path that led Johnson to leap from the scrappy Canadian film industry to the luxurious land of Hollywood.
In that sense and more, Tony feels like the spiritual sequel not to Nirvanna but to Johnson’s anxious 2023 corporate comedy BlackBerry, another film focusing on what happens when bright young screw-ups manage to change the game despite or perhaps because they’re dripping with insecurity and failure. (Less important but still interesting parallels between Tony and BlackBerry: both films share a cast member – Rich Sommer, who played an engineer in BlackBerry and here takes on the Bourdain family patriarch – and a sight-gag about one character’s Velcro wallet, a sure sign of immaturity.)
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Yet Tony works as a film whether or not you know the arc of Johnson’s made-in-Canada career. At its heart, this is a movie about how we all grow up desperately trying to construct our own myths, and what happens when insecure ambition meets the cold splash of reality. It might focus on the origins of a beloved pop-culture figure, but there are so many moments in which you can forget about the beats and markers of Bourdain’s real life and simply enjoy it as a story about one man’s voracious aspirations and appetites.
Set entirely during the summer of 1975, Johnson’s film opens with Tony fighting twin battles: his careening academic performance and his suffocating home life. While his father is blindly supportive of his goal to become a novelist, his mother (Dagmara Dominczyk) gives Tony the full Livia Soprano treatment, undermining and correcting him at every opportunity. There’s also more than a shade of the family dynamics in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights here, complete with Tony seeking refuge in his poster-adorned childhood bedroom.
Emilia Jones plays Tony's fellow student, Nancy.Seacia Pavao/A24
Dopily encouraged by a quick, pseudo-flirtatious encounter he has at a local bar with a fellow student named Nancy (Emilia Jones), Tony impulsively packs his duffel bag and heads to Cape Cod in the middle of the night.
But after arriving in the picturesque, lobster-littered Provincetown, Tony quickly runs out of money and schemes, and blows one opportunity after another to hook up with Nancy. Through a semi-contrived series of circumstances, he ends up working as a dishwasher in the grimy kitchen of a stern taskmaster only known as Chef (Antonio Banderas). It’s here where Tony’s love of culinary culture is born, alongside third-degree burns to his hands and knife wounds to his fingers.
Resisting the cradle-to-grave tropes familiar to so many dull biographical films – including the neat omissions of such hagiographies as the new Michael Jackson movie – Johnson slyly offers audiences a narrow but pivotal peek into Bourdain’s life. This isn’t a dully reverent catalogue of Bourdain trivia nor a kitschy collection of Kitchen Confidential Easter eggs (no one, thank god, throws out a line like, “No reservations”). It is a small portion of private life, imagined publicly.
It is also, crucially, built around a tremendous lead performance from Sessa. After breaking out with Alexander Payne’s 2023 dramedy The Holdovers, the actor continues to give off the impression that he’s been teleported here from a bygone era of Hollywood, where commitment and energy were paramount. Unconcerned with the faintest hint of vanity, and contorting his wiry frame into the most uncomfortable and embarrassing of poses, Sessa captures the rogue, restless spirit of Bourdain while creating a young punk entirely his own. The actor ensures that you root for Tony even when he is being a danger to himself and anyone else who might trip into his orbit.
These supporting players include not only Banderas’s deeply soulful spin on Chef, but also a firecracker turn from Leo Woodall as Tony’s bad-boy oyster-shucking mentor, Sal. Together, Chef and Sal’s back-of-the-house personas play the respective angel and devil sitting atop Tony’s shoulders, each of them making reasonably convincing arguments for either sticking your nose to the grindstone or shoving those nostrils full of cocaine.
The careful attention that Johnson pays to the intimate dynamics and politics of a restaurant’s kitchen, though, results in some shortcomings when the film steps outside of that space. While Nancy is the most layered female character to appear in a Johnson production, she is also basically the only woman to ever achieve that milestone. And though Jones (best-known for navigating altogether different small-town tensions in CODA and HBO’s Task) makes Nancy her own person, the film doesn’t give enough insight into her own path outside of the one Tony is hastily laying down in front of her.
The screenplay – penned by writing partners Todd Bartels and Lou Howe before Johnson dug into it with his long-time producer and co-writer Matthew Miller – also briefly swerves into sentimentality toward the end, with deep and painful emotional wounds too quickly healed by a convenient plot device that we’ll call Chekhov’s clambake.
These are all minor grievances, though, when stacked against the film’s characters, its sense of place and its easy but by no means simple rhythm. Working with both long-trusted collaborators – Miller, editors Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch, composer Jay McCarrol – and such imaginative new co-conspirators as director of photography Michael Bauman (One Battle After Another), Johnson creates a world that bridges the faux-doc jitteriness of his earlier work with the richness of one-perfect-summer Hollywood cinema.
This tension between the scrappier work of Johnson’s past and the potentially glossier routes of his future feels neatly summed up in a drive-in double bill that Tony and Sal take in one evening. There is Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, the prototype of American blockbuster filmmaking, but also Violent City, a cheapo exploitation flick that Charles Bronson made before Death Wish catapulted him into slightly more reputable pulp. Which way should Johnson go? Well, as the two-for-one screening suggests, why not both?
To bring it back to the food, as Bourdain might prefer, the world is now Johnson’s oyster. Tony ensures that he can crack it open any way he likes.