Some biopics take the soup-to-nuts approach to their subject (although the chronology may be jumbled up for cinematic interest), hitting the notes of each well-known triumph and failure.
Others opt to drill down on a short but pivotal period, usually one of soul-searching before a change of creative direction. Rock icons seem to lend themselves particularly well to this more focused approach, as seen in last year’s Bruce Springsteen’s wrestling-with-the-Nebraska-album film Deliver Me From Nowhere and 2024’s look at the run-up to Bob Dylan going electric, A Complete Unknown. Now, a crucial year in the life of the late Anthony Bourdain—who brought the same bad-boy rock-star energy to the food world—gets the same treatment in Tony.
Adapted from the opening chapters of Bourdain’s autobiography Kitchen Confidential, the film looks at one significant summer (in fact, said writer/director Matt Johnson, a compression of three summers) in the future chef’s life when he went from being, as a title card taken from his memoir Kitchen Confidential tells us, a “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless young lout … badly in need of a good ass-kicking” to something resembling a viable human being capable of considering other people’s needs and feelings.
The catalyst for this transformation was a stint in the kitchen of a Provincetown, Massachusetts, restaurant, starting at the bottom of the food chain as a dishwasher. When he arrived in the summer resort at the tip of Cape Cod in the early 1970s, Bourdain—then on the verge of flunking out of Vassar—was an unpleasant combination of arrogance and insecurity, bravado and neediness, given to informing all and sundry that he was a writer hard at work on a novel (not a word of which had actually been written, of course). It is as part of the kitchen crew that he discovered order, focus, a sense of purpose, and a tribe. As he said in 2017, “this was the first discipline, the first organization—because it is a very militaristic organization, the kitchen brigade—the first people whose respect I wanted and the first time in my life that I went home feeling respect for myself.”
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