Tony

Nor did he always go by Anthony — only his mother calls him that, the college-aged Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) explains in the first scene of BlackBerry director Matt Johnson’s exceptional biopic about the beloved gourmand. What Bourdain actually wants to be is an author, hence why he’s applying for a prestigious fellowship when we meet him. He introduces himself as a writer, boasts about that fellowship to anyone who will listen before he’s actually received it, and turns off the girl he’s trying to impress (Emilia Jones) by using words like “insouciant” and “valediction” — all within the span of a few minutes.

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In his book Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain didn’t mince words when describing himself during the time covered by Tony: “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” The movie doesn’t pretend otherwise, but it does highlight the ways in which that makes him compelling to watch rather than repellant.

So does Sessa, whose breakthrough came in Alexander Payne’s similarly bittersweet The Holdovers and who now seems like a fully fledged movie star. He paints a portrait of the artist as an angry, directionless young man who’s not exactly not charming despite his pretensions, the kind of person whose friends insist isn’t that bad once you get to know him. And indeed, you can tell there’s a good guy waiting to emerge if he’d just get out of his own way. The novel he’s planning to write is a bildungsroman, a German loanword he repeatedly mispronounces that refers to coming-of-age stories. Tony itself is a cinematic bildungsroman, one whose wayward protagonist is repeatedly humbled on the way to reluctantly growing up.

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Like most good biopics, Tony doesn’t presume to tell its subject’s entire life story. It focuses instead on a particularly revealing chapter of it: in this case, a summer on Cape Cod spent working in a seafood restaurant and falling in love with food under the guidance of an enigmatic chef (Antonio Banderas) after being denied that fellowship. He’s already in love with a girl, or at least infatuated with her: Nancy (Jones), the Vassar classmate he followed to the island in hopes of wooing. There’s no epiphany or aha moment accompanied by an obvious needle drop, just the growing sense that, despite all evidence to the contrary, he’s somehow found himself exactly where he needs to be.

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He really is miserable and self-destructive, though. Tony lies to everyone about nearly everything: Nancy believes he’s on Cape Cod for the fellowship; the unnamed chef, whose hammock he’s sleeping in, believes he’s worked in a kitchen before and completed the required safety training. More importantly, he believes his own bullshit: Tony is still in the process of becoming himself, as anyone his age would be, but he’s too busy pretending to be something he’s not to see the person he’s meant to be.

Like most good biopics, Tony doesn’t presume to tell its subject’s entire life story.

Tony is also about food, albeit to a lesser extent than Bourdain’s shows No Reservations and Parts Unknown. Tony learns how to shuck an oyster, acquires a taste for the squid stew he and the rest of the kitchen staff dine on after shifts, and convinces Chef to make lobster thermidor to impress Nancy. “It’s extraordinary,” he says after taking a bite of fish that Chef insists is black, not burnt; this, wisely, is the closest Tony ever comes to one of those Eureka moments so familiar in movies like this. (Speaking of extraordinary: Banderas is the film’s secret ingredient, delivering a zesty performance that proves a side dish can be just as enticing as an entree.)

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Anthony Bourdain meant a lot of things to a lot of different people. He strove for authenticity in everything he did, a noble pursuit that shined through in television shows, food, and, yes, writing. That he left the world the way he did continues to sting, but Tony is a poignant reminder that the last, most tragic chapter of his life is far from the only one worth remembering.