Producers: Tim White, Trevor White, Matthew Miller and Matt Johnson   Director: Matt Johnson    Screenplay: Todd Bartels, Lou Howe, Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller   Cast: Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall, Stavros Halkias, Michael Jibrin, Monica Raymund, Rich Sommer, Dagmara Domińczyk, Liam Fitch, Joe Burns, Allyn Burrows and Eric Ripert   Distributor: A24

Grade: B+

You don’t have to be a foodie to enjoy Matt Johnson’s partial biopic about how young Anthony Bourdain redirected his aimless life to cooking.  “Tony” is a movie set in the mid-1970s that actually feels as though it might have been made then, which, it turns out, is a good thing.

Though the script is based on the early chapters of Bourdain’s 2000 book “Kitchen Confidential,” the adaptation is extremely loose, restructuring the story as a Bildungsroman in a Hollywood sense—a nice joke, since that’s the word nineteen-year-old Tony (Dominic Sessa) uses to describe a novel he plans to write to a faculty committee at Vassar in applying for a summer scholarship.  It’s an example of his facility at bullshitting about anything and everything; he’s just making stuff up as he goes along.

He uses the same technique when he tries to pick up fellow student Nancy (Emilia Jones), who sees through his baloney and dismisses his come-on by saying she’s about to leave with her friends for a summer in Provincetown.  Dejected but semi-obsessed with her, he goes home, where he impresses his father Pierre (Rich Sommer) with the news of the scholarship he’s (presumptively) won, though his mother Gladys (Dagmara Domińczyk), more clear-eyed about his propensity for deception, is rightly doubtful.  When a call from Professor Dobson (Allyn Burrows) informs him that another student has won the prize, Tony pretends he’s still the recipient but abruptly leaves his parents and younger brother Christopher (Liam Fitch) behind to go to Provincetown in search of Nancy.

The fishing village on the tip of Cape Cod is a hub for tourists, slackers, druggies and other assorted misfits during the season, and Tony soon finds himself running out of money and prospects.  As he’s about to leave, though, he runs into Nancy’s friend Robin (Caroline Portu), who tells him Nancy’s working at a pizza joint.  Unfortunately, she has a boyfriend (Joe Burns).  Depressed, Tony winds up at the bar of a seafood joint called the Flagship, where he fails to pick up waitress Mary (Monica Raymund) and gets tossed out for his trouble.  He’s robbed of his cash while drunk in the street.

Fortunately, the place’s owner, a breezily efficient Portuguese fellow known simply as Chef (Antonio Banderas), takes pity on him and not only gives him a spot as a dishwasher but a place to sleep on his back porch, where he awakens the kid each morning by dumping a pail of seawater in his face.  The arrangement gives him the chance to pursue Nancy—with lies about his writing, of course—while learning to deal with the raucous kitchen activity from Chef and the other employees, chubby coke-sniffer Stavros (Stavros Halkias), rogue Sal (Leo Woodall) and straight-arrow Tyrone (Michael Jibrin).

The trajectory is a pretty obvious one.  Tony softens under the influence of Chef, a master artist who’s abandoned high culinary aspirations to have his own place and live freely as well as a religious fellow who demands that his charges be on time and keep their language in line.  (As long as Tony is staying with him, he insists the kid go to church with him on Sunday mornings.)  And he moves up the staff ladder, though not always in the most pleasant way: he replaces Sal, a real louse who makes Tony look positively genteel by comparison (he has the habit of taking a literal notch from the doorframes of girls he successfully beds—like a sorority girl played by Ava Davey-Bissett) after the guy not only breaks Chef’s rules but punches him. 

Of course, the course of Tony’s improvement isn’t without hurdles.  When he comes clean with Nancy about his deceptive ways, it undercuts the progress he’s made with her.  And when he persuades Chef to try an upgrade on the menu, disaster results.  But that encourages the kid to come up with a plan to help the man who’s become his mentor, proving how different he is from the utterly self-centered Sal. 

And, of course, his experience has changed the direction of his life.  He decides to apply to the Culinary Institute of America, of which Chef is an alumnus—and whose recommendation carries weight with its director (Eric Ripert).  Although that’s where the movie stops, we know that Bourdain went on to a career as a chef himself; but we also know that he never really gave up his literary aspirations, going on to become both a best-selling author and a celebrity TV personality.

Johnson and his writing collaborators (Todd Bartels, Lou Howe and Matthew Miller) have cannily recrafted Bourdain’s Provincetown experiences into the sort of redemptive arc that seventies audiences would have recognized from other movies of the time.  And he and his crew (cinematographer Michael Bauman, production designer Ryan Warren Smith, costumer Chloe Karmin and editors Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch) have not only recreated the bustling, rakish atmosphere of the Provincetown of the period (shooting on the Cape itself), but have captured the scruffy look and feel of many of the movies of “New Hollywood’s” golden age as well.  (That comes as no surprise after Johnson’s success in reimagining the early tech world of “BlackBerry” in 2023.)  Jay McCarrol’s keyboard-heavy score likewise suits the era, and the narrative.

But “Tony” would collapse if the cast weren’t up to the challenge.  Sessa fulfills the promise of his debut in “The Holdovers” with his rich performance as a young, self-described lout nervously, uncertainly finding his way to an end he never had any idea about before arriving at the Flagship.  And just as he did with Paul Giamatti in Alexander Payne’s film, he pairs beautifully with Banderas, who’s obviously relishing the opportunity to play a part as likable and engaging as Chef.  Jones and Halkias provide excellent support (as do Sommer and Domińczyk as Bourdain’s very different parents, the one happily oblivious to his son’s faults and the other sharply attentive to them). 

But it’s Woodall who’s most striking among the supporting cast.  He’s unafraid to make Sal as obnoxious as necessary to strike a sharp contrast to Tony, suggesting what Bourdain might have become had he not fallen under Chef’s spell.  An episode to which Bourdain attested regarding his treatment of a bride is especially telling, but so is his plan to take advantage of an event he helps Tony stage as a fund-raiser in the last act. 

So long as you recognize that it takes considerable liberties in its portrait of Bourdain as a young man, you should find “Tony” a Hollywood Bildungsroman of the finest old-fashioned sort.