Whose summer deserves a biopic? Can it be that pivotal on a career, a life, a legacy?  In the case of Tony, it’s a way into the life of Anthony Bourdain, the celebrated chef, celebrity chef and author who died in 2018. The window is something, capturing his life out of high school in 1975, but Bourdain’s definition of himself strictly defines the starting point and the transformative events of that summer.

Anthony Bourdain, Tony (Dominic Sessa), just can’t stop lying. Especially when his punchy attempt to get a writing scholarship falls through. A drunken collapse when he realises the girl he idolises from school, Nancy (Emilia Jones), isn’t waiting open-armed for him when he heads to Cape Cod to see her has an unexpected consequence… A hammock for the summer in return for working at the seafood restaurant of a Brazilian chef (Antonio Banderas). As he falls in with the self-destructive chef Sal (Leo Woodall), is there any chance the self-absorbed, delusional Bourdain can learn anything?

Of course he can; he became Anthony Bourdain. He claims the name ‘Anthony’ at the end of the film, in what could have been a much starchier ending. It’s not much of a spoiler, because that’s just one aspect of the young chef breaking out of the definition the older chef gives himself in the movie’s opening quote. Our protagonist is a “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout.” He’s played to brilliant irritation by Sessa, wholly watchable, simultaneously open and vulnerable, and shackled. It’s a kind of extension to his breakthrough role in 2023’s The Holdovers. Bourdain is an awkward, unlikeable oik, and we have to spend the whole film with him.  

He’s brooding, morose and blinking through the inconsistencies he traps himself in. But just as it’s hard to take to him, it’s impossible not to back him breaking the cycle, even when almost every single action of his in the film is objectively terrible. The question is, does he find someone who can give him the ‘good ass kicking’ his older self assures us he badly needed? Kind of.

The beauty of Tony, a superbly paced film, is in watching Boudain. First there’s the climb.  The cycle is the hero’s journey, set up for lows and highs, and hitting the three-act structure. But it’s a joy to watch Sessa and Woodall (having a wail of a time off the leash) causing chaos, even as it stretches too far. It’s even more of a joy watching the relationship between chef and dishwasher warm, especially the impeccably timed wake-up calls.

While it’s the selfishness that lies behind the wannabe (or is he) chef’s altruism, that doesn’t mean you can’t be swept up in the kitchen filled with shucked shells, and in two surprising moments, the suspense before some brutal injury.

Banderas hands in a stunning performance, a soft guttural—with the Latin fuse within him not to blow but, when hurt, again and again, quietly settling as an acknowledgement of his own flaws. Tony doesn’t present a happy ever after, but through a few cutaways on a beach, leaves a fulfilling sense of characters ending up in the right place.