Review: Bourdain Biopic 'Tony' Is Only an Early Nibble

"Tony," the Anthony Bourdain biopic opening in Los Angeles and New York on Aug. 7, tells a coming-of-age story about a single summer in a Cape Cod restaurant kitchen in 1975 — and never gets close to the traveler viewers would come to love decades later on shows like "Parts Unknown." Two stars out of four.

Director and co-writer Matt Johnson takes liberties with a formative period in Bourdain's life but manages only to show how a callow lad became a slightly less callow lad. The film opens with a line from Bourdain's star-making 2000 memoir "Kitchen Confidential": "I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking."

Dominic Sessa plays the teenage Bourdain as an angular misfit, hunched and peering through a mop of unruly curls — a surly Bob Dylan in kitchen whites. Joy rarely flashes across his face, even for lust or food. He moves from dishwasher to plating shrimp cocktails while absorbing the insult-based, testosterone-filled culture of the line.

Bourdain devoted two chapters of "Kitchen Confidential" to this time in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and returned to it in episodes of "A Cook's Tour" and "Parts Unknown." He described developing two love affairs that summer: one with the kitchen, another with hard drugs. "This is where I bought my first bag of heroin," he says in "Parts Unknown." The film never depicts his heroin use, and never shows how the writer in a Stooges T-shirt became a global culinary raconteur.

Johnson, who wrote the screenplay with Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, invents a new culinary mentor and adds showy references to the 17th-century chef François Vatel and to "sin eaters," plus a Hollywood-scale kitchen fire. Antonio Banderas plays the mentor as spiritual, punctual and deeply religious while silently overseeing a misogynistic, racist and drug-addled crew.

There are lovely moments: shucked oysters used to flirt, a cameo by chef Eric Ripert, Emilia Jones as Bourdain's love interest and Leo Woodall as his kitchen and drug pal, Sal.

The A24 release expands Aug. 21. It is rated R for "pervasive language, drug use and sexual content/nudity." Running time: 106 minutes.