The kind of thing its fake-it-till-you-make-it young hero would overconfidently refer to as a bildungs roman (sic), Matt Johnson’s “Tony” is a briny and bittersweet coming-of-age movie about an obnoxious kid so eager to be someone that he tries to skip over the hard work of becoming. Turns out it doesn’t work like that — or at least it didn’t used to.
That said kid will later grow up to be acclaimed chef, bestselling author, and iconic travel documentarian Anthony Bourdain is almost completely irrelevant to the insouciant fun of watching this leather-jacketed leech bounce around Provincetown in the summer of 1975, where he’s looking for anything but experience. Right now, he’s just a 19-year-old Dominic Sessa with an idea for an idea, some big words he doesn’t fully understand, and a pair of nunchucks tucked away in his bellbottoms. Quoth Bourdain in the film’s opening title card: “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” In “Tony,” which retains the sincere flavor of street meat despite being factory-processed within an inch of its life, he gets that ass-kicking hard and fast.
The smartest aspect of the film’s script — credited to Johnson, Todd Bartels, Lou Howe, and Matthew Miller — is how framing its lead as such an inveterate self-mythologizer allows “Tony” to distance its version of Bourdain from the legend that he will ultimately become. “No Reservations” neophytes are invited to take the character at face value, while those of us who’ve spent hundreds of hours watching Bourdain eat his way across the Earth can savor how perfectly Sessa’s embodiment mistakes the ingredients of his eventual success. Bourdain was a relaxed-casual ronin with a wandering spirit and a refined taste for the truth; Tony is an arrogant brat so desperate to be Holden Caulfield that he forgets Holden Caulfield was defined by wanting to be Anthony Bourdain.
Tony’s One Magical Summer begins with the delusional conviction that he’ll be awarded a writing grant for some bullshit he pitched about J.D. Salinger. “A lot’s changed since high school,” he tells — not shows — a pretty, unimpressed classmate (Emilia Jones as Nancy) after bumping into her at a bar one night. “The truth is that I’m about to get this huge fellowship.” Actually, the truth is that the committee is about to pick a much worthier candidate for the cash, and that Tony, having also lied to his parents about winning the prize, is going to follow Nancy up to Provincetown in lieu of any better ideas.
It turns out there are some minor problems with that plan. For one thing, Nancy is already spoken for so far as summer-long situationships are concerned (she’s fucking someone who’s only defined as “a pizza delivery guy with a big dick”). For another, Tony is only in town for a few hours before he gets drunk on cheap beer, pisses off the entire staff of the only half-decent restaurant in town, and gets robbed of the last few dollars in his wallet by the kitchen worker who volunteers to throw him out of The Flagship head-first. That isn’t enough to humble our black-eyed lout, but spending a few months as a dishwasher at The Flagship in exchange for getting to sleep on the head chef’s hammock soon will.
Gently washed in the “how were we ever so young?” nostalgia of a summer that its namesake won’t come to appreciate until he starts writing that part of his memoir, Johnson’s film offsets the halcyon sentimentality of its tone and structure by surrounding Tony with the saltiest people he’s ever met. That’s a low bar to clear in regard to an upper-middle-class Vassar freshman who’s obviously petrified of his mommy (Dagmara Domińczyk), but sharing a kitchen with a guy like Sal would be an education for any booksmart college boy who thinks he’s got the world all figured out.
Pure id in a restaurant full of half-formed egos, Sal — played by “Tuner” star Leo Woodall in the best performance of his young career — is an ultra-charismatic Masshole who devours every moment of his life as if it’s his last meal. He’ll fight or fuck or fuck you over at the drop of a hat because that’s what’s in front of him, and he’ll do it with all the emotion of someone chewing their food. This is all Sal will ever be, and an aspirant someone like Tony can’t help but love him for it, even if Sal would probably set fire to the Flagship just to watch it burn. This movie is incandescent every minute that he’s in it.
‘Tony’
Stavros Halkias, Michael Jibrin, and Monica Raymund help round out the kitchen staff with a jocular, blue-collar vibe that seems modeled after the crew of the Nostromo (if you’ll forgive the anachronism), while the otherwise unidentified Chef rules over the restaurant with a quiet sense of respect — not only for his employees, but for the sacred task of serving fish and chips to people who can afford summer homes on the Cape. A Portuguese immigrant whose squinty demeanor and monastic lifestyle belie how transparently he longs to mentor an impudent kid like Tony, Chef is a role that would have rang false if not for how Antonio Banderas’ well-modulated performance refuses to let his role be reduced to its function in someone else’s story. In his hands, Chef sees potential in Tony without ever reducing him to the chosen one; he thrills in molding the kid into shape, but Banderas — in tune with Johnson’s allergy to anything that might resemble “Good Will Hunting” — gives Chef enough space to suggest that his life won’t be defined by teaching a young Anthony Bourdain how to shuck an oyster.
Some other people in Tony’s orbit aren’t quite so lucky. Nancy is the worst offender, which is ironic given the enormous part she’ll go on to play in Tony’s life after this movie ends. Reduced to little more than a beautiful girl with a Minolta camera and a latent desire to photograph the real person hiding under Tony’s see-through swagger, Nancy only exists so that he can have someone to lie to. Jones is unfailingly believable, but it’s hard to be cast as human scaffolding, and Johnson — whose faux-documentary style has always encouraged him to avoid such plainly schematic characters — can’t manufacture enough verisimilitude on a minute-by-minute basis to save Nancy from the obviousness of her overall purpose.
As much as the movie delights in churning Tony through the same coming-of-age tropes he’s trying to skip right over, its beach-town energy and Brian Eno needle-drops are increasingly clouded by the looming inevitability that Nancy will learn about Tony’s deception. That’s only made worse by the fact that it’s treated as some kind of grand betrayal rather than an impulsive act of youthful stupidity that will make for a good story one day. By that point, it doesn’t register as much of a surprise that “Tony” plays into expectations where any of Johnson’s previous films would have zagged in the other direction, as this is by some measure the most conventional thing the “BlackBerry” director has ever made (to the point that it almost feels like an experiment to see what might happen if one of his irrepressible motor-mouths was trapped inside the dimensions of a Polaroid). Zooms are out, and super long lenses are in, as Johnson — trusting in the magic of Sessa’s wholly self-possessed lead performance — chooses to de-emphasize Tony’s subjectivity in favor of playing up genre form.
That gamble pays off for the most part. Johnson recognizes how this, at heart, is a coming-of-age story about a rising star who’s learning to be unburdened by a future that’s better than he could ever imagine — a kid who’s learning that no one can become the person they pretend to be without being the person they actually are along the way. “Tony” struggles for an ending, but it doesn’t really need one; the real fun here lies in paving the way to parts unknown.
Grade: B
A24 will release “Tony” in theaters on Friday, August 7.
