TONY

Before Anthony Bourdain became Anthony Bourdain, he was a broke 19-year-old trying to convince everyone, including himself, that he was destined to be a great writer.

TONY follows him to Provincetown chasing a girl in the summer of 1975, where he arrives completely broke. He ends up washing dishes at The Flagship, a seafood restaurant where the kitchen staff drink hard, abuse drugs, bicker constantly and somehow still manage to get the dinner service out on time. It's the first time Bourdain encounters the aggressive culture of professional kitchens that he would later describe so vividly in KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL.

Dominic Sessa plays him, and he's an inspired choice. Sessa was excellent in THE HOLDOVERS, and here he portrays the titular character as funny, smart, arrogant, insecure and often completely full of shit. Tony lies because it makes him feel more interesting. He talks too much because silence leaves him alone with himself. You can already see the voice that would eventually make him famous, but it's still attached to a teenager who has no idea yet what to do with it.

Antonio Banderas plays the chef who gives him his first job. He's calm where Bourdain is chaotic, disciplined where Bourdain is impulsive, and becomes the first person to show him that restaurant work can be more than something you do just for a paycheck. Bourdain thinks he's there temporarily. We the audience know he's stumbled into a situation that will determine the next thirty years of his life.

TONY is technically a biopic, but director Matt Johnson wisely avoids trying to explain an entire life. There is no childhood montage, no television career, no attempt to recreate every famous moment. It concentrates on one summer and asks a much simpler question: when did this person first become interested in the thing that would eventually consume him? That gives TONY a strange advantage over most biopics. We already know exactly how Bourdain remembered this period because he wrote about it himself, in considerable detail, decades later.

There is something very appealing about watching the beginning of a life rather than the highlights of one. We know where Bourdain eventually ends up. TONY is interested in the summer when he had absolutely no idea.