Before the bestselling memoirs, the television expeditions and the passport full of stamps, Anthony Bourdain was a 19-year-old washing dishes on Cape Cod. That single summer is the whole canvas of “Tony,” A24’s biographical comedy-drama that is playing in American theaters this fall and reaching new audiences this month through an expanding theatrical run and home viewing.
Directed by Matt Johnson, the filmmaker behind “BlackBerry,” the film stars Dominic Sessa — who broke out opposite Paul Giamatti in “The Holdovers” — as the young Bourdain. Rejected for a writing fellowship in 1975, the restless teenager follows a girl to Provincetown, Massachusetts, takes a job in a seafood restaurant kitchen, and discovers, in the heat and chaos of the line, the appetite and voice that would define his life. Antonio Banderas plays the chef and restaurant owner who becomes an unlikely mentor, with Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall, Dagmara Domińczyk, Rich Sommer and Stavros Halkias rounding out the cast.
The film, drawn from stories in Bourdain’s 2000 memoir “Kitchen Confidential,” was released theatrically by A24 in the United States on August 7 and has built its audience the old-fashioned way: word of mouth and some of the strongest reviews of the late summer. It holds a 93 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, was named a New York Times Critic’s Pick, and drew a rave from the Wall Street Journal. Arts venues have kept it in rotation into the fall — Vermont’s Catamount Arts, for example, hosts a run from October 9 through October 22 — and A24 has rolled the film out for digital purchase and rental for home viewing.
Johnson has said the film was shaped in unusually close collaboration with his star. The two first met over lunch in New York, and within an hour, by Johnson’s account, they were sketching what became the screenplay together — two restless New Jersey kids who did not fit in at private school. Sessa is in essentially every shot of the 106-minute film, and he has said he approached Bourdain through curiosity rather than imitation: the young chef’s insistence on never being the smartest person in the room.
The Bourdain estate has supported the project while making clear it is not a cradle-to-grave biography. In its words, the film is an interpretation of one transformative summer — the kitchen crews, the mistakes, the first stirrings of a sensibility that would eventually produce “Kitchen Confidential,” “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown.”
That narrow focus may be the film’s smartest choice. Bourdain’s public persona was so vivid that any attempt to summarize all of him risks flattening what made him compelling. “Tony” wagers that a summer of dish pits, mentors and bad decisions tells you more about the man than a highlight reel — and audiences this month, in theaters and at home, get to judge whether the wager pays off.
The timing of the film’s long theatrical tail is no accident. A24 has built a specialty in exactly this kind of release: open strong in the summer, let reviews and word of mouth accumulate, then stretch a title through art-house and community venues into the fall, when audiences who missed the first wave catch up. The October dates at venues like Catamount Arts — a two-week run in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, with adult tickets under ten dollars — show the strategy reaching towns where a Bourdain film plays less like an event than a neighbor’s recommendation.
It helps that the subject keeps recruiting new admirers. Bourdain’s books and series continue to find younger readers, and a film about the summer he became himself offers that audience an origin story without the eulogy. Not a bad trade for a dishwasher from Provincetown.
