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Bravado, insecurity, deceit. These are the bitter ingredients that seasoned the chef Anthony Bourdain inside the pressure cooker of the restaurant industry. Set over one formative summer in 1975, Matt Johnson’s affectionately sleazy biopic “Tony” is a portrait of the culinary adventurer (who died by suicide in 2018 at the age of 61) as a snotty 19-year-old Vassar student who doesn’t know an oyster knife from his ego. “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” Bourdain confessed in his 2000 bestseller “Kitchen Confidential,” a scorching memoir that elevated him from obscurity to damaged saint. “Tony” opens with that quote and proves it with scenes of boozing, puking and petty crime. Miraculously, it’s the most heartwarming comedy of the year.
Teenage Tony (a feral Dominic Sessa of “The Holdovers”) claims he’s already writing the next great American book, a navel-gazing bildungsroman — his word, not mine — in the key of Kerouac. Really, he’s just a middle-class kid from New Jersey who doesn’t expect to work for a living. Stalking his high school crush Nancy (a grounded Emilia Jones) to Provincetown, Mass., he begrudgingly supports himself with a dishwashing gig at the Flagship, a humble seafood joint. The kid is ashamed of blue-collar labor. That his rowdy co-workers think he sucks at it is worse. This taste of humiliation would change his destiny.
Under the tutelage of the Flagship’s idiosyncratic unnamed chef (Antonio Banderas), Tony will discover the importance of punctuality. A devilish shellfish-shucker (Leo Woodall, an intoxicating scamp) will also introduce him to cocaine. That first bump hits Tony with such a rush that the soundtrack explodes with boogielicious disco.
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Sessa was born to prowl around wild-eyed in retro polyester. He relishes the fast and funny dialogue, flinging around fancy words that don’t mean a thing. At low emotional tide, Sessa’s Tony can also be watchful and quiet. He makes us hear the character’s silent inner schemes as loudly as when he’s actually blabbering.
Director Johnson (“BlackBerry” and the maniacally brilliant “Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie”) and his co-screenwriters Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe have blended every hard-knock lesson that Bourdain learned across decades of job-hopping into one month of blood and sweat. Spiritually, it’s fantastic. Factually, it’s baloney, although “Tony” does restore the restaurant’s actual name — the Flagship — from Bourdain’s Dreadnaught, the pseudonym he gave it before he ever imagined future fans following him around the world. Mild spoiler alert: Readers of “Kitchen Confidential” will also know it’s dedicated to Nancy, who became his first wife.
The kitchen scenes are a combo platter of boot camp, frat house hazing ritual and kung fu movie. As Bourdain would later explain, he thrived in a setting where actions have instant consequences: a sore back, a sliced hand, a good meal. Burn the sandwich, toast it again; scrub every plate and punch out with pride. You can’t help but grin at Sessa’s hoot when his scrawny Tony finally manages to muscle a raw potato through a french-fry slicer. And at the end of a shift, he and his dysfunctional workplace family gather to share bowls of squid stew and taste the results of their work. Back in New Jersey, dinnertime with his biological family feels as cold and stale as their meal of frozen peas and store-bought white bread.
Banderas’ chef is the kind of mentor you’d expect to find on a mountaintop mediation retreat, starting over a half-dozen scenes coldly waking up the sleeping whippersnapper with a cold bucket of morning seawater to the face. As Banderas plays him, he’s a bearish marvel of a man with the kind of earthy soul that would have had Ernest Hemingway chugging salty dogs on his barstool all night. There’s a shot of Banderas biting into a tomato that’s pure bliss for him and us.
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Whereas Tony talks a big game, squeezing Japanese words like boketto — the art of doing nothing — into conversation, Banderas shows us how to simply do it. (Likewise, a centerpiece montage makes penning a coming-of-age book look way lamer than than just living a full life.) Watching Banderas’ chef stare at the Atlantic, it may occur to you that a cook can no longer afford a waterfront shack on the sand. The film is too breezy to say so directly, but its emphasis on the value of honest work wants you to think it.
Watching Banderas spend a day simmering his own handcrafted ketchup simply to store it in repurposed Heinz bottles says everything about the guy’s devotion to food and his indifference toward marketing. It’s a little grating to see boorish Tony offer him business tips. It helps that some of his advice isn’t great.
“Tony” stays planted in its own immediate present, rarely hinting at the veers Bourdain’s biography will take. “Kitchen Confidential” won’t be published for another 25 years; his globe-trotting celebrity comes after that. Johnson keeps the tone so zingy and loose that you don’t have to know Bourdain at all to enjoy the movie. The ending even tacks on a let’s-save-our-hangout rally that could be Velcroed onto any ’80s comedy.
The script allows itself just two beats to squeeze out a knowing tear. The first comes when Tony describes his approach to writing: “I try to imagine interesting places I’ll probably never go, people I’ll never get to meet,” he says, unaware how much his horizons will one day expand. The second trickier and clumsier aside happens when Banderas’ chef tells Tony the tragedy of 17th century French cook François Vatel, who literally fell on his sword before serving a banquet to Louis XIV. Lore has it that Vatel didn’t have enough fish. The teenager doesn’t understand. “He killed himself? Why?” Tony repeatedly asks. That question will never have a satisfying answer.