Portrait of the Artist as a Young Asswipe. Matt Johnson’s film concerns a seminal summer in the nascent career of a young, pretentious punk-ass who eventually grows up to become Anthony Bourdain, capturing, in essence, a young man at the precise crux between his reach and his grasp. As beloved as the later-day Bourdain, the one-time high-end chef, turned tell-all memoirist, and eventual global TV mainstay, became, by his own admission, his early years were pockmocked by fits of self-absorption, self-destruction, and grating irascibility that, to his considerable credit, he has never shied away from (in the film’s epigraph, he refers to himself in that era as a “spoiled, narcissistic brat.”)
Working from his own script, amongst a cadre of other credited writers, Johnson’s film depicts a callow Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) in the early summer of 1975. Then an undergrad at Vassar, Bourdain attempts to earn a writing fellowship by lying through his teeth hoping to impress the committee professors. When that ultimately fails, and with no prospects on the horizon visible from his suburban home in NJ, he steals some cash from his sympathetic father (Rich Sommer), and heads out into the night, catching an early train up to Provincetown in Cape Cod, where a longtime high school crush named Nancy (Emilia Jones) told him she was going to spend the summer.
Only when he gets there, decked out in a blue leisure suit and high-soled black boots, he finds that she’s already taken up with a townie who works with her at a pizza parlour. Stricken, but too prideful to acknowledge his utter failure, he holes up at a seedy seafood bar/restaurant, gets drunk, and grabby and finds himself tossed to the sidewalk with a shiner for his trouble. He wakes up the next morning in a hammock near the beach at the house of the chef (Antonio Banderas) of the restaurant he got heaved out of the previous night.
His money stolen, his eye throbbing, Tony is left with nowhere else to go, and begs Chef to let him continue to stay with him. In order to pay his way, he’s made the restaurant’s dishwasher, working with a slovenly kitchen crew, including Stavros (Stavros Halkias), Tyrone (Michael Jibrin), and Sal (Leo Woodall), the dude who clocked him the night before, a bang-up bro with a reckless nature and a penchant for pushing boundaries.
Over the course of the summer, Tony begins to befriend Chef, who shares stories of his serious training at the prestigious CIA in New York; while also spending time carousing around with Sal, getting drunk and high, and skimming the surface of being an irresponsible lowlife. Tony’s not necessarily like Sal, a streetwise meathead with ladykiller panache, but he sees in his impetuousness and irresponsibility all the things he thinks he’d like to be.
As always, Tony attempts to bluff his way into what he wants: He insists throughout the film to anyone who will listen that he’s a “writer” and working on some massive, very impressive project, of which he writes not a single word. Later, in the kitchen, he tells the staff confidently that he’s spent many hours working in a kitchen, as his dad is “the best chef in New Jersey.” He knows what effect he wants to have on people, but also has the burning knowledge that he has nothing to back up his bold statements other than a grandiose, (one surmises, tremendously insecure) sense of self.
Eventually, of course, these oppositional courses of action leads to a sort of face-off between trusting, honorable Chef — whose extensive culinary background belies the largely fast-food menu at the restaurant (even still, Tony marvels at Chef’s insistence on making the greasy-spoon type seafood of the highest order, even painstakingly making his own ketchup to put into the emptied out Heinz bottles) — and the irascible, conscienceless Sal, who has the beginnings of a serious dope habit, among other troubling kinks.
Thus ensues a kind of Platoon-esque showdown between the different pathways for Tony to take: Does he embrace his inner-dirtbag (also hinted strongly in the film: Bourdain’s own eventual drug addictions and manic nature) with Sal, or follow the more enlightened path suggested to him by Chef, a man so inherently caring and trusting, he puts his very business’ survival in the hands of a kid who has lied and slouched his way through life to this point.
Fortunately, other than the inherent dramatics of a personal crossroads, this entertainingly low-key film avoids the obvious histrionics of Oliver Stone’s would-be dramatic opus. You get the impression that more than anything, Johnson wants the film to be a clear-eyed dissection of the different, often competing forces in Bourdain’s life, from his mother’s withering criticism and disdain (when he lies to his more upbeat father about earning the fellowship he also notes his mother “isn’t going to care” even if it were true), to his own (seemingly misplaced) sense of exceptionalism.
Johnson’s film perfectly captures its ‘70s vibe (down to the movie playing at the drive-in on one of Tony’s wild escapades: Jaws), and the sense of adventure and despair that more or less defined the decade. While both Banderas and Woodall are great, Sessa, with his hangdog countenance and his unruly, Weird Al-style curls, perfectly captures the simmering petulance and vulnerability of his subject. His version of Bourdain is all smoke and mirrors, a kid filled with churned up significance who knows all-too-well the Kleenex-flimsy lies upon which his entire persona is built. He’s an absolute fraud, and worse, he’s keenly aware of it.
I came to the film prepared for a vaguely hagiographic rendition of Bourdain — a man with whom, as a strong animal-rights advocate, I have more than a few bones to pick — but instead came away captivated by his all-too-relatable struggle of finding one’s true self through the thick, putrid cloud of adolescent egocentricism. I can’t agree with him about, say, foie gras, but I can’t ignore the universality of his plight of becoming.
Tony is similar, in some ways, to another recent biopic about a favored Jersey native son, but while Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, tracks a period of time in the musician’s life after he had already achieved a significant amount of fame (and is treated with the wide-eyed reverence of a Significant Artist); Johnson’s nimble film feels more in keeping with the self-lacerating nature of Bourdain himself, a man whose whole raison d’etre was taking himself down a peg or two. It’s a beautiful bowl of chowder.
