Anyone who ever read Anthony Bourdain’s books, watched one of his globe-hopping culinary travel series or even just sat down to a mouth-watering plate of steak frites at Manhattan’s Brasserie Les Halles during his tenure there as executive chef probably has an idea of the man behind the self-made success. His bluntly unfiltered storytelling and conversational style, his passion and curiosity as a cultural explorer, his eloquence in the language of food and even his amusing bad-boy arrogance were all part of a larger-than-life, unapologetically authentic personality. Almost a decade after his shocking suicide by hanging, Bourdain remains an iconic figure as both celebrity chef and accidental anthropologist.

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Matt Johnson’s Tony is a prologue to all that, tightly focused on the pivotal summer the rudderless 19-year-old Bourdain spent in Provincetown in 1975, washing dishes in a seafood joint, where he stumbled onto his vocation, right before enrolling in the Culinary Institute of America. It’s a lovely grace note that Bourdain’s friend and colleague for more than 20 years, Eric Ripert, is on the admissions panel in a brief scene.

A slender slice of a famous life, the movie feels a little wispy in its mix of scrappy and sweet, rough-edged and yet bathed in the balming glow of nostalgia. But it has an idiosyncratic charm that fits the title character, without ever sanding down the abrasive side of a chronic liar or masking his insecurities. 

Making good on his promise in The Holdovers, Dominic Sessa is excellent in the role, nailing the contradictory aspects of a slippery character while mapping his coming-of-age arc with empathy and honesty. There’s no dark foreshadowing of the tragedy we know will come 43 years later — only chutzpah, raw potential and intermittent flickers of vulnerability.

Working from an original script by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, Johnson and regular producing and writing partner Matthew Miller — they collaborated on 2023’s BlackBerry and this year’s mockumentary Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie, among other projects — reshaped the perspective to capture the interiority of the unformed Bourdain. We meet the title character as a lost young man, trying to figure out who he wants to be, but putting up a façade of brash self-assurance in the meantime.

Even on a visit to his childhood home in New Jersey, Tony — the more serious, grown-up “Anthony” comes later — reads as a narcissistic blowhard with his parents, warmly affectionate Pierre (Rich Sommer) and flinty Gladys (Dagmara Dominczyk), who seems to view their eldest son with a look of preemptive disappointment. He applies for a paid writing fellowship at Vassar, pitching a novel that sounds like he’s making it up during the interview. Despite that, Tony is so sure he aced it he starts sharing the news that he has secured the fellowship, continuing even after he is informed that it went to another candidate.

We hear the word “bildungsroman” at least four times in the early scenes, as if the writers felt the need to spell out their intentions in a bio-drama that is less a portrait of a life than of a transitional moment.

At a student-hangout bar one night, he spots Nancy (Emilia Jones), his former high school crush and — subsequent to the period covered in the movie — future wife, sitting with friends, including a snarky cousin who instantly tags Tony as a shameless bullshitter. But Nancy is mildly intrigued, telling him she will be spending the summer in Provincetown but inviting him to come find her in the fall at Vassar.

With his plans for the summer nixed, Tony lifts a handful of cash from his dad’s wallet and impulsively follows Nancy to the former fishing port on the tip of Cape Cod. It doesn’t take him long to find her, working a pizzeria counter, but he’s crushed to see her kissing a horny co-worker (Joe Burns).

Tony tries drowning his sorrows at the bar of the Flagship, a no-frills seafood eatery run by a man identified only as Chef (Antonio Banderas). But when he comes on strong with bartender-waitress Mary (Monica Raymund), he gets thrown out and roughed up by Sal (Leo Woodall), the oyster-shucking bruiser from the kitchen.

With a black eye and an empty wallet, Tony decides to leave on the next morning’s ferry, but a chance encounter with Nancy changes his mind. He continues to lie about the writing fellowship and assure her that she has nothing to do with his reasons for being there. Whether Nancy buys it or not, she invites him to a party that night at the house she’s sharing with her girlfriends.

Meanwhile, Tony meets the Flagship chef again, this time on less hostile terms. Soulfully played by Banderas as a contemplative man who attends Mass in Portuguese every Sunday — a nod to the town’s early immigrant fisherman community — and maintains an air of mystery about what brought him to Provincetown, Chef offers Tony a job washing dishes and a place to crash, sleeping on a hammock on the deck of his beach house. 

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Tony also finds Sal tagging along to Nancy’s party and watches morosely as she drifts off with the pizza dude while Sal literally carves a notch in a bedroom door frame following what appears to be just the latest in an endless succession of quickie hookups.

So begins a summer of education, chastening disaster and eventual redemption for the fledgling super-chef, who’s no innocent but not yet a confident adult who knows what he wants, either. Basically, he’s just faking it as he goes along.

A big part of Tony’s experience is his unexpected friendship with Sal, a brawler who’s never slow to start throwing punches, eager to consume whatever drugs are available and whose louche charms and sexy smile are catnip to women. This is a terrific role for Woodall, with shades of his party-boy hustler in season two of The White Lotus, Sal’s loose-cannon volatility balanced by surprising loyalty to Tony.

The more instructive part, however, is Tony’s time in the chaotic Flagship kitchen, where Chef turns a blind eye to the cocaine and weed circulating but has strict rules about timekeeping and efficiency. When Sal inevitably screws up, Tony gets promoted to oyster shucker, suddenly finding himself part of an alternate family, with fellow kitchen staffers Stavros (comedian Stavros Halkias) and Tyrone (Michael Jibrin), and Mary running front of house.

This central plot thread is almost like a blueprint for the behind-the-scenes access to restaurant life in Bourdain’s bestselling first book, Kitchen Confidential — hazardous, intense, messy and a magnet for misfits. It seems true to the title character as drawn here that he would thrive in such a high-pressure environment, especially under the exacting mentorship of Chef. 

We also get a glimpse of Bourdain as someone who runs toward a challenge, entrepreneurial in his proposal to Chef that they introduce a Friday-night lobster thermidor special, which he wants to prepare, undaunted by the limitations of his culinary education. Banderas’ character is well past his ambitious years, having done his time in Michelin-starred restaurants all over Europe. But his avuncular encouragement of Tony in what could be absolute folly brings real heart to this section — until calamity intrudes.

The relatively weak link in the script is Nancy, who’s too underdeveloped as a character to give her burgeoning romance with Tony much structure, and consequently gives Jones (CODA) little to work with. She’s cool and attractive, but not much more, even if her slow-burning interest in Tony suggests she’s drawn to his weirdo vibe.

Johnson shows a light touch with the period needle drops (Eric Burdon and the Animals, Richard and Linda Thompson, Kool & the Gang, etc.). But Walter Murphy’s classical-goes-disco banger “A Fifth of Beethoven” is the most dynamic of them, punching up the energy for Tony’s Icarus-like rise and fall — even if the single wasn’t released until a year after the movie’s timeframe. Elsewhere, sharp use is made of a playful score by longtime Johnson collaborator Jay McCarrol, with sleepy piano passages echoing underlying notes of melancholy.

The production and costume designs capture the mid-’70s with pleasing understatement, and Johnson’s fondness for pop culture humor is evident in quirky asides like a passing shot of the nearby Wellfleet Drive-In signage, showing the seemingly incongruous double-feature pairing of Jaws with the Charles Bronson crime thriller Violent City. The ultimate Cape Cod movie, Jaws was first released that year and became a defining cultural moment of summer 1975, while Violent City was a favorite of Bourdain’s, its Ennio Morricone title track in high rotation on his cooking playlists.

The soft pink glaze of the Cape Cod light (gorgeously captured by DP Michael Bauman, fresh off his Oscar-nominated work on One Battle After Another) gives the film an atmospheric luster that helps fortify the somewhat ambling nature of the narrative. Enough of the shoot was done in Provincetown itself to provide a warm evocation of the popular Massachusetts summertime destination, even if the movie could almost be accused of straight-washing its picturesque setting.

While P-town’s explosion as an LGBTQ mecca came later, the roots of its gravitational pull for queer tourism by all accounts were readily apparent in the post-Stonewall years. Making the Flagship’s Mary and her partner the only same-sex couple we catch a glimpse of feels like tokenism. But hey, local institution Spiritus Pizza, where Nancy works, still operates today, often fondly referred to as “Slut Pizza” because of the throng of gay men that converge there every night at 1 a.m. when the bars close, many of them madly swiping left on Grindr. I guess that will have to count as representation. 

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