Tony: Everything We Know So Far About The Anthony Bourdain Biopic

The trailer for the A24 film about Anthony Bourdain, "Tony," dropped this morning and we learned a lot about what to expect when the movie comes out this August. Matt Johnson, director of the comedic dramatization of development of one of the first smartphones, "BlackBerry," and the wild comedy "Nirvanna: The Band – The Show – The Movie," directed the biopic. The movie is a fictionalized version of the chef's first summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, working at a restaurant.

The trailer opens with Bourdain pursuing his love interest, played by Emilia Jones. He's lost, trying and failing as a writer. He's getting drunk, tossed out of bars, and broke. As he wrote in his book, "Kitchen Confidential," he was "a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking." The good ass-kicking comes in the form of a job working as a dishwasher for a disciplined chef, played by Antonio Banderas, and the mouthy cooks, played by Stavros Halkias and Leo Woodall. Bourdain put it simply in his book, "the cooks ruled."

"Tony" doesn't cover Anthony Bourdain's entire life like many biopics do. We won't see his eventual success as a writer over 25 years later with his fateful New Yorker piece, his stumbling through filming his first show, "A Cook's Tour," or the days leading up to his death by suicide in 2018. Instead, the story focuses on two chapters out of his breakthrough book, "Kitchen Confidential." The chapters covered are "Food is Sex" and "Food is Pain" and cover his two summers in Provincetown. 

Director Matt Johnson told Entertainment Weekly that he chose the era of the chef's life because it "covered a period of his life that remained mysterious and shrouded in self-report." The two chapters sketch a turning point in Bourdain's life, allowing Johnson some artistic license. "It meant the cast and I could investigate this man's origin together," Johnson told the magazine. In the book, the chapters cover two separate summers — in the trailer it appears they are merged into one, life-altering season of Bourdain beginning as a lost troublemaker and ending as a chef troublemaker.

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Brutal honesty was a famous calling card of Anthony Bourdain. His refusal to toast the queen — and his pointed words to those who suggested he should, and his saying to wealthy Singaporeans "you're living off the labor of a repressed underclass," both from "Parts Unknown," are just two examples of his pulling no punches. (While he tells the Singaporeans that he's just "f***ing with them" and they all laugh together, there is still a sense that he means what he says in the clip.) He was consistently open about all his personal failings. Plus, he loved to be creative when it came to getting an emotional story across. This instinct is part of what led to his many Emmy Awards.

So, when his estate released a statement about the movie, it was embracing the tack Matt Johnson took. "He was a man who valued authenticity above all else," his estate said. The implication is clear — there will be no sanitized glamorization of the chef's life in the story told. "We chose to support 'Tony' because it is not a standard biopic and doesn't attempt to summarize a life," they went on. The story shows both the good and the bad, which Bourdain was up front about. His estate continued: "We appreciate the portrayal of Tony's complexity, his intellectual appetite and his conviction."

Playing Anthony Bourdain comes with a lot of pressure. His fans can be protective of his legacy and will speak up if they feel something rings false. The reaction to the documentary about Bourdain, "Roadrunner," was mixed on Reddit. If it feels low-effort or dishonest, the fans will let you know. So Dominic Sessa has his work cut out for him.

Sessa is best known for his role as Angus Tully in "The Holdovers," a story about boarding school troublemakers who stay on campus over Christmas break. Director Matt Johnson found connections between Sessa and Bourdain. "[They are] both from Jersey, both sent to private school, but didn't fit in, both restless and searching," he told Entertainment Weekly. Johnson developed the story with input from Sessa, describing: "I knew if a scene was working when Dom said, 'Seems right,' and I knew it wasn't when he said, 'Why would I say this?' More than any movie I've ever made, this film was a partnership with an actor."

Early Reddit reactions of his acting in the trailer are positive. "It took me some time to really hear the energy of Tony from Sessa, but I think it started to come out," posted one Bourdain fan. Another commenter added: "right around 'makes you wanna f***, you know' I was like, oh yeah, he's got it."

In "Kitchen Confidential," Bourdain writes about two main chefs of the restaurant he worked at. There's Bobby, "a well-toasted, late-thirtyish ex-hippie" whom he works with at The Dreadnaught his first summer, and Howard Mitcham at Mario's Restaurant. He writes "Howard was the sole 'name chef' in town." He describes him as "furiously alcoholic," and having "wild, unruly white hair, a gin-blossomed face, [and] a boozer's gut." He also describes him as a master of seafood with two influential cookbooks to his name: "The Provincetown Seafood Cookbook" and "Creole, Gumbo and All That Jazz." "His signature dish was haddock amandine, and people would drive for hours from Boston to sample it," Bourdain reports.

Antonio Banderas is playing a chef named Ciro. He appears to be a more disciplined version of Mitcham who teaches Bourdain both the ways of seafood and the ways of being a dependable member of a functioning team. In the book, it's an experience working for Tyrone at the broiler station in the kitchen of Mario's Restaurant that compels Bourdain to go to school at the Culinary Institute of America, one of the top culinary schools in the country. By the look of the trailer, Ciro is a version of Chef Mitcham that will inspire Bourdain to choose his path.

The rest of the influences on Anthony Bourdain during this period of his life are the girl he followed to Provincetown and the cooks he fell in with. Of the crew of cooks, he wrote "They had style and swagger, and they seemed afraid of nothing. They drank everything in sight, stole whatever wasn't nailed down, and screwed their way through floor staff, bar customers and casual visitors like nothing I'd ever seen or imagined." He looked up to them, giving him a North Star to follow to a life of debauchery. "The life of the cook was a life of adventure, looting, pillaging and rock-and-rolling through life with a carefree disregard for all conventional morality. It looked pretty damn good to me on the other side of the line," he wrote of how his just-out-of-high-school self saw his new coworkers. In his book, he wrote about graduating high school early to follow a girl to Vassar, then about an "on-again-off-again girlfriend" who worked at a pizzeria.

These roles are filled by Stavros Halkias, Leo Woodall, and Emilia Jones. Halkias and Woodall play the troublemaking cooks, with the comedian Stavros looking especially pirate-like with his bandanna, open shirt, and gold chains. Jones plays the love interest who asks Tony, "Are you a good guy or a bad guy?" The answer appears to be "it depends on when in his life you ask him." "Tony" hits theaters this August.