I suppose Matt Johnson’s Tony is a best-case scenario for a bad-idea biopic, where, if one were to trim a bit from the runtime, you’d wind up with a regular ol’ coming-of-age story, and it’d be a pretty solid one as well. As a certified super-fan of Greg Mottola’s Adventureland and its ilk, I’m always down for an “idyll struggle,” where a meek young protagonist self-actualizes and crafts an adult identity in the chrysalis-like warmth of summer employment and shit-kicking. It’s why folks have eaten up bildungsroman in all forms of media throughout time — we love these hero’s-journeys-in-miniature because they mirror some aspect of our own experience. And, as far as movies based on Anthony Bourdain’s life go, this one has the least AI-generated audio.
Bildungsroman is a word that Tony Bourdain (Dominic Serra) knows but doesn’t know how to pronounce. That’s not going to stop him from using it to describe his first novel at the family dinner table, having half-assed the application for a prestigious literary fellowship at Vassar. Of course he’s not going to get it. He knows, on some level, that he’s not going to get it. Still, he just has to tell everyone he knows that he’s gonna go off to the city and become a writer and so on and so forth, especially when it piques the interest of a high-school crush (Daisy Edgar-Jones). She’s planning to spend the summer with her cousins on the Cape, and when the dreaded call comes and Tony’s run out of walls to punch holes in, he lifts some money from his dad’s wallet and makes his way to Provincetown.
Money dries up nice and fast when drinking away your sorrows, and after being a real dickhead to the staff at a small seafood joint, he finds himself fully destitute. Weirdly enough, that same spot will become his salvation — ‘Chef’ (Antonio Banderas), the owner-operator and head of the place’s kitchen, takes pity on the kid, giving him a place to crash and a dishwashing job to pay his way home. It’s in that spot, hands prune-like and fingers raw, that he starts sensing he might be right where he should be. The other staff — charismatic, hell-raising junkie Sal (Leo Woodall), cool-as-ice Tyrone (Michael Jibrin), and resident gut-buster Stavros (Stavros Halkias) — take a weird liking to the kid after some appropriate hazing. As you’d expect, he grows, learns, loses, and finds a passion that’ll define the rest of his tragically too-short life.
As in Blackberry, Johnson’s casting is excellent. Woodall and Banderas are fantastic as the polar opposite role models that Tony’s drawn to, and Banderas in particular seems to relish his part. He has undeniable chemistry with the rest of the cast, but is at a quiet remove from the kitchen staff, as befitting a head chef. Serra is a fierce young talent, and his Bourdain picks up where he left off with Alexander Payne — a rakish type on the cusp of True Adulthood, who isn’t quite ready for the world and still has a lot of growing up to do. The character has a childlike approach to concealing his vulnerability, bullshitting and blustering his way through life, his charm smoothing things over, breaking like a little boy when the house of cards crumbles. He’s smart, but he wants to be cool, and he hasn’t lived enough life to be authentic — he is self-actualizing, in the way that one pretends to be what they want to become. The stories, the credibility, the experience: All of that will come in time, with work and a not-insignificant amount of luck. The fact that Serra’s can fully realize this nervy proposition and is able to keep us with Tony as he makes poor choice after poor choice, and that Johnson is willing to make a movie less-than-hagiographic, is central to the film’s success.
Seriously, I nearly expected this movie to open with Bourdain, like a young Jesus, teaching the kitchen staff as if it were an episode of Kitchen Nightmares. Instead, it makes him a character who has to take his lumps like any other moron. He could hardly do it in a better place, too — Johnson’s made the best advertisement for that far-too-expensive Cape rental since Jaws, and this time one doesn’t even have to worry about getting eaten by a great white. One can practically feel the sea breeze rippling through their hair and smell the brine, bathed in the warm sunshine. The best part is that it isn’t Vancouver Island or something — this is real-deal Provincetown, and Michael Bauman’s cinematography looks every bit as warm and lush as it did on his works with PTA. So, yeah, this is a legit motion picture, surprisingly enough, though Johnson’s not going up to dethrone Mottola any time soon as the modern king of this type of picture. It’s about three Replacements tracks away from being close, though.