Dominic Sessa as a young Anthony Bourdain in Tony.
Photo: Bob Gruen
Midway through Tony, the new film about Anthony Bourdain, the title character, played with brash naïveté by Dominic Sessa, leaps off a pier in Provincetown, Massachusetts, into the Cape Cod Bay at dusk. For a split second, shirtless, limbs akimbo, shoes still on, he is utterly and totally free, untethered from his past and unencumbered by the man he will become. That freedom is momentary. Bourdain eventuallys hits the surface, Tony becomes Anthony, and in the film’s closing moments, the man edges ever closer to myth.
Tony is a brisk 106-minute biopic focusing on one summer Bourdain spent in Provincetown when he was a student at Vassar College. The film was directed by Matt Johnson, a Torontonian whose previous best-known works were Nirvanna the Band the Show and 2023’s comedy BlackBerry about the ill-fated PDA, starring Jay Baruchel and Glenn Howerton. (Tagline: “Work hard. Fail hard.”) A sort of loser’s Social Network, that film gained purchase by treating two schmucks as heroes. In Tony’s best moments, it treats a hero as just another schmuck. That alone is enough to set it apart from so many of the works that have come out in the wake of Bourdain’s 2018 death.
“We were obviously aware of the Tony industrial complex,” Lou Howe, one of the screenwriters, tells me, “and that was something we wanted to avoid.” It helps, Johnson adds, that he had “no relationship” to Bourdain: “I could talk about him the same way I could talk about Mickey Mouse, a very famous person who people seem to like.” He says it granted him the freedom to approach Bourdain cold and have “no preconceived notions and absolute-zero anxiety” over taking on a subject whose fans are so protective of his legacy. “It was a gift of my own ignorance,” Johnson says.
When the film premieres this week, it will enter the well-established canon of posthumous Bourdainia. Other notable entrants include Morgan Neville’s 2021 documentary, Roadrunner; Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, by his longtime assistant, Laurie Woolever; the rather seedier Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain, by Charles Leerhsen; Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, a collection of his writing; the anthologies The Anthony Bourdain Reader and World Travel; Woolever’s own memoir, Care and Feeding, in which Bourdain plays a central role; a forthcoming Bloomsbury reissue of three of Bourdain’s lesser-known crime novels; and a TV adaptation of Bourdain’s 2012 graphic novel, Get Jiro!
These projects are just a fraction of the cottage industry that has sprung up around the chef and author, who may seem more present today than he did in his lifetime. He lives now in the Bardo of the algorithm, omnipresent in Reels and YouTube clips. As social media is not prized for expressing the subtlety of the human spirit, the image of that Bourdain — the late-stage Parts Unknown–era Bourdain, exclusively — is almost laughably wise, compassionate, and prophetic. He’s a chain-smoking Odysseus, a merry Sisyphus. Choose your myth; it hardly matters. Every time someone reposts one of his quotes about traveling, they add another brick to the building of a complex that both capitalizes on and obscures the real Bourdain.
Antonio Banderas and Sessa in Tony.
Photo: Bob Gruen
In some ways, this is inevitable: As the man fades further into the past and can no longer correct or add to the record, we fill in the gaps with what we want him to be. Who doesn’t love a misanthrope with a heart of gold, the poète maudit with a strict moral code? Every generation has the idol it glorifies, the figure who remind its members of their youth and whose likeness comes to embody the values they wish to project. Gen X has the disaffected genius of Kurt Cobain. Boomers have Elvis Presley, whose hip-swiveling silhouette made more money in death than it did in life. The Elvis industrial complex, worth approximately $500 million in biopics, musical revues, rhinestone key chains, and impersonators, long ago displaced the man inside it.
But then, Elvis’s shtick was spectacle; Bourdain’s oeuvre focused on what it means to be human, fallible, and real, qualities that are lost when someone’s memory is turned into a product line. It rankles me personally because I knew him — not incredibly well, but well enough — and still feel resentful as I watch the person he was get supplanted by a stained-glass, sainted reproduction.
By focusing on his death (and coming out so shortly after it), Roadrunner has an air of vulturous predation that was unmistakable even at the time of the film’s release. Similarly, Leerhsen’s book is a morbid, if entertaining, biography, a death-and-sex-obsessed doom spiral. The temptation to consecrate Bourdain was succumbed to even more acutely in The Last Interview, with the gospel undertones of its title. Happily, the contours of the Bourdain industrial complex have lately begun to shift. Care and Feeding — Woolever’s own memoir of sex, drugs, and personal assistance — is not predicated on knowledge of or reverence for Bourdain. It is Woolever’s story, not his. It concerns him but does not leverage his memory. Although the book naturally includes an account of his death, Woolever is much more concerned with his life, which is also where Tony places its focus.
“There were three windows we could choose from: The first was the globe-trotting days of No Reservations and Parts Unknown,” explains Todd Bartels, who co-wrote the screenplay with Howe and Johnson, “the second was his bad-boy heroin days as a chef in New York, and the third was the summer in Provincetown, which makes up three chapters in his memoir, Kitchen Confidential.” The trio chose the latter, fastening the film’s attention not on the Bourdain we all knew — or thought we knew — but on a Bourdain who is coming to know himself. Johnson made the calculus that the fewer actual Bourdain data points there were in Tony, the more relatable the movie would be. By and large, this calculation is right. Though that leaves those who knew him feeling that the actual man has been effaced, we are such a sliver of a minority — what sense would it have made to optimize for us?
Tony is, at its heart, a bildungsroman, a word the self-professedly pretentious Bourdain both uses and mispronounces in the movie. Over the course of a few glorious sweaty months in a Provincetown kitchen, Tony discovers cooking, experiments with drugs, finds love, eats pizza, and bakes clams on a beach. By the end, Tony becomes Anthony. Johnson interviewed many people who knew him, spent time in P-town himself, and obtained the imprimatur of the Bourdain estate. In doing so, he has made a piece of art that can, hopefully, help Bourdain’s spirit — not just his name and his likeness — live on.
