‘Tony’ Review: Dominic Sessa Gives His First Movie-Star Performance in Matt Johnson’s Tasty Biopic About the Young Anthony Bourdain
But as I watched “Tony,” Matt Johnson’s drama about the young Anthony Bourdain and the summer he spent in Provincetown working in a restaurant kitchen for...
Key points
- But as I watched “Tony,” Matt Johnson’s drama about the young Anthony Bourdain and the summer he spent in Provincetown working in a restaurant kitchen for the first time, I couldn’t help but wonder what Bourdain himself would have made of the movie.
- To me, if an Anthony Bourdain biopic can’t clear the bar called “Bourdain would have liked it,” it’s probably not a good movie.
- “Tony” has been framed as the origin story of how Anthony Bourdain became Anthony Bourdain.
- But one of the many things that Matt Johnson, the director of “Blackberry” and “Nirvana The Band the Show the Movie,” understands is that Anthony — or, as he called himself then, Tony — already was Anthony Bourdain.
What happened
But as I watched “Tony,” Matt Johnson’s drama about the young Anthony Bourdain and the summer he spent in Provincetown working in a restaurant kitchen for the first time, I couldn’t help but wonder what Bourdain himself would have made of the movie. To me, if an Anthony Bourdain biopic can’t clear the bar called “Bourdain would have liked it,” it’s probably not a good movie. “Tony” has been framed as the origin story of how Anthony Bourdain became Anthony Bourdain. But one of the many things that Matt Johnson, the director of “Blackberry” and “Nirvana The Band the Show the Movie,” understands is that Anthony — or, as he called himself then, Tony — already was Anthony Bourdain. The movie is all about how Tony knows, in his bones, that he wants to be a writer, but discovers that he was meant to be a chef. He tells everyone there that he’s got the writing fellowship, which for Tony is a class-snob thing; it makes him feel worthy.
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