August gets caricatured as a dumping ground of movies that studios don’t quite know what to do with. Naturally, going into Tony, a comedy-drama biopic loosely based on the early life of Anthony Bourdain, I wasn’t expecting much, even from A24, which has had more misses in recent years. Yet director Matt Johnson (Blackberry)’s latest was a surprising treat, full of laugh-out-loud moments, teenage nostalgia and heartwarming moments from complicated characters that really got me in the feels. Anthony Bourdain is perhaps better known across the pond as the late American celebrity chef whose tell-all memoir, Kitchen Confidential, was a New York Times bestseller, giving an unfiltered look inside the restaurant world via his own drug-fuelled misadventures.
Tony is a loose retelling of the book’s early years, set in 1975, following a 19-year-old Dominic Sessa as Bourdain. Having played a cynical 70s youth in The Holdovers, Tony feels like a spiritual sequel, with the star clearly typecast into a role he plays exceptionally well. His semi-fictional Tony follows his high school crush (Emilia Jones’ underwritten Nancy) to Cape Cod, where he pretends to be doing a writing scholarship he failed to get while pursuing her. After a brief drunken squabble at a seafood joint, Antonio Banderas’ restaurant owner Chef takes pity on him and lets him sleep on the hammock of his beachfront house porch, in exchange for working a summer job for free.
Tony settles in on washing up duty while getting schmoozing tips from Leo Woodall’s charming playboy, Sal. Aside from the humour and more emotional moments, the film masterfully plays with your perceptions of characters as you get to know them throughout the story. Without going into spoilers, you start wondering why someone is doing something early on, only to learn more about them later in the movie. In one case, a likeable character turns out to be not so likeable and when you look back to how they behaved at the beginning, you realise it was all hiding in plain sight. A rare summer treat amid all the blockbuster noise of Spider-Man and The Odyssey
Tony hits UK cinemas on Friday.
