Becoming Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain has always felt like a guy you know. His blockbuster debut, “Kitchen Confidential” — a bratty memoir and a dishy dossier into the real goings-on in industry kitchens — led to not one, but two, extremely popular travel shows: “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown . ” The shows made Bourdain a hyper-visible celebrity gourmand, but he managed to avoid the tackier choices made by his counterparts. He didn’t shill branded cookware or open an airport restaurant chain. Against all odds, he remained self-deprecating, adventurous and genuinely folksy, always seeming at once unstudied and self-aware. He was, in short, cool in a way that is in desperately short supply eight years after his death .

By his own account, this wasn’t always the case. Matt Johnson’s latest film, “Tony,” opens with an epigraph from “Kitchen Confidential” about Bourdain’s era as a self-described peacocking 20-something: “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” The man we remember today was formed during a summer spent dishwashing in a Provincetown, Massachusetts, seafood shack. This is the period depicted by “Tony,” and the result is a portrait of Bourdain not just pre-fame, but pre-food.

Though he preserved a salt-of-the-earth aura, Bourdain grew up in “a leafy green wonderland of brick colonial homes, distant lawn mowers, backyard croquet games, gurgling goldfish ponds and Cheeveresque cocktail parties.” The version of Bourdain produced by this world — young, expectant, unskilled, obnoxious — is the one we meet at the beginning of “Tony,” when he (Dominic Sessa) needs something to do in his summer off from Vassar.

Much of what makes Sessa’s performance good is his physical movement.

He is already certain he is going to become someone. He saunters around his college bar announcing he’s already been awarded a writing fellowship (that he does not end up receiving, because his pitch, like his personality, is pretentious and unoriginal). Embarrassed but too egotistical to admit it, Tony escapes to Provincetown to chase girls and maintain the lie about his nonexistent fellowship and novel. Much of what makes Sessa’s performance good is his physical movement. Rather than attempting to perfect a voice or appearance, Sessa (who got his break as the prickly, lonely Angus in “The Holdovers”) embodies Bourdain’s semi-hunched lope and coyote’s stance. What should read as insecure instead reads as scavenging. In exchange for sleeping in a hammock, Tony takes on a job as a dishwasher for the exacting Ciro (Antonio Banderas) at his seafood shack, the Flagship. Banderas plays a very classic Banderas-type: stern exterior with tenderness beneath. The men of The Flagship kitchen are crass and wild, but they are also genuine hard workers. They show up on time, they follow the rules of the kitchen and although they may not be book smart in the way that Tony’s family values, they are skilled in their profession. Unlike Tony, they are actually doing something instead of just talking about it.

The modern biopic is often tainted by an overbearing subject (or, in the case of the ghastly “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the subject’s estate.) There is a tendency toward the polished, the censored, the brand-approved. But Bourdain’s willingness to deride himself — especially his younger self — allows for “Tony” to freely portray young Bourdain as a narcissistic jerk who is unable to stop screwing things up: losing himself in his lies, making gargantuan errors at the restaurant, bumbling in interactions with girls. This feels like an honest and respectful iteration of the young man Bourdain sketched out in “Kitchen Confidential.”

But in other ways “Tony” is yet another projection of someone else’s stuff onto the Bourdain scrim. In a recent Vulture profile, director Matt Johnson acknowledges that he knew so little about Anthony Bourdain before the film that “in [his] mind, Bourdain was no different from Guy Fieri.” “Tony,” then, became as much “a biography of Bourdain as it is of Johnson,” with Johnson acknowledging mining some of the story from his own challenging relationship with his mother, egotistical 20s and heady dreams of artistic success. To know anything about Johnson is to know that he tells the same story again and again, and it’s not dissimilar from Bourdain’s. From “Nirvana the Band the Show” to “The Dirties” to “Tony,” Johnson is preoccupied with a kid so obsessed with being an artist that he becomes insufferable and detached from the world around him.

“Tony” does include a few premonitory shudders about what was to come for Bourdain. The story of François Vatel — the chef who killed himself out of shame when the fish for King Louis XIV’s banquet came late — is told offhandedly by Ciro to a perplexed but disturbed Tony, and a youthfully acceptable predilect for beer and cocaine skirts Tony ever closer to heroin use. At first, I found Tony’s reason for being in Provincetown — chasing a girl he was unsuccessfully strutting for in a Vassar bar — to be a crass cinematic contribution to the mythos that has endured since Bourdain’s death of a man overcome by the peaks and valleys of romance. But upon returning to the sacred text of “Kitchen Confidential,” I saw even this was set in truth: Bourdain talks about going to P-town to live with his friends and see his “on-again-off-again girlfriend [who] spun pizza for a living.”

“Tony” is about the age in which you think you know everything but still know absolutely nothing.

The sweetest moment of the film is a half-truth buried deep within Tony’s delusions. When detailing the (entirely invented) daily routine he keeps while writing his novel, Tony speaks of afternoons spent walking the beach and imagining “places he’ll probably never go and people he’ll probably never meet.” For the Bourdain fans, “Tony” will read as both premonitory and posthumous — we know what’s to come for this arrogant but mutable young man, both good and bad. But for the totally uninitiated (a person hard to imagine, as Bourdain has always felt culturally ever-present), “Tony” will read as a classical coming-of-age story.

“Tony” is about the age in which you think you know everything but still know absolutely nothing. This relatability is particularly apparent because we follow him in the time when he was no one special — denied a meaningless fellowship and the object of his affections. It’s a fitting homage for a man of the people. During his 12 years on television, one could watch Bourdain connect with seemingly anyone, anywhere. Todd Bartels, who wrote the original script for “Tony,” described Bourdain as a “globe-trotting ambassador.” In interviews and writing, he was also politically vocal about his leftward leanings, and took pains to credit the unsung heroes of the restaurant industry whenever possible. (“The very backbone of the industry, whether you like it or not, is inexpensive Mexican, Dominican, Salvadorian and Ecuadorian labor — most of whom could cook you under the table without breaking a sweat,” Bourdain writes alongside a plea for chefs to learn Spanish in “Kitchen Confidential.”)

Whether or not Bourdain was as leftward and bold as he can sometimes be portrayed after his death is another question. An illustrating Eater interview completed just after Donald Trump ’s first election exemplifies his distaste for those vying for anything genuinely revolutionary or outside democracy as it currently stands.

In the end, Anthony Bourdain transcended politics. The chance to break bread and shoot the shit with him became an image so compelling that then-President Barack Obama trekked to a Vietnamese noodle shop for the chance. So coveted does his approval remain that his once-assistant grapples with an artistically mind-bending question in a recent essay : Would Tony like “Tony”? Would that make it good? Given that “Tony” refuses to fawn over or mythologize its subject, instead offering a taste of the man when he was unformed and raw, the answer is maybe yes.

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