“It’s going to be a bildungsroman…” Tony (Dominic Sessa) announces at the dinner table “… a coming-of-age novel.” He’s talking about a novel he has pitched at a prestigious scholarship interview. His father (Rich Sommers) is excited, his mother (Dagmara Dominczyk) is more circumspect. He’s almost certain he will be chosen for the scholarship, after which he will embark on his journey to be what he already believes is a crucial part of his identity. “I’m a writer,” our 19-year-old protagonist says while introducing himself at a bar in an earlier scene. As we all know now, the debut novel (Kitchen Confidential) would only arrive 25 years later.Before Anthony Bourdain became a renowned chef and a worldwide phenomenon – he was just a kid. An arrogant, entitled, insufferable young man, who thought the world owed him a stage to showcase his brilliance. He was also an incessant and effortless liar. In Matt Johnson’s film, we meet Bourdain when he’s – as the title suggests – Tony, and follow him over an eventful summer. His mother calls him Anthony, which the rebel can’t stand. Hence, he goes out of his way to ask people to not call him that.A still from Tony.The year is 1975, Tony is drunk on his confidence and self-worth. So much so, that without a thought in his head, he lies to his parents about getting the scholarship and follows a girl to Provincetown, Massachusetts for the summer. Circumstances lead him to getting kicked out of bar after he misbehaves with a waitress, to a samaritan’s hammock, and then inside a commercial kitchen to wash dishes – in exchange for sleeping on the hammock to earn some money back for the ferry ride back home. Tony is a fairly straight-forward film. What elevates it is Johnson and his ability to put his own spin on familiar genres. In Blackberry (2023), he told the familiar tale of the rise and fall of the mobile handset company. A film on ambition outlasting friendship, it doubles up as a cautionary tale about the fleeting nature of ‘success’. Similarly, as much as Tony wishes to be a coming-of-age tale about the summer that made Anthony Bourdain – it does a few things that are refreshing. A still from Tony.Sessa, who broke out playing a troubled high-schooler in The Holdovers (2024), is an unlikable, self-centred underdog over here. Being shown mercy by the chef (Antonio Banderas), who provided him with a place to sleep and work in the kitchen, Tony has little to no gratitude. He continues lying to the girl, Nancy (Emilia Jones) that his novel is set in a restaurant kitchen, and he’s working there for “research”. He paints the town red with his kitchen colleague Sal (Leo Woodall) – a regular user of cocaine and heroin, who becomes his de-facto mentor in town. Tony becomes an inadvertent accomplice in stolen cars, drunken brawls and stealing. Woodall is superb in a scene when he gets into an altercation with Banderas’s chef, when he’s demoted to washing dishes for being late. In that scene, young Tony is learning to shuck oysters for the first time, and accidentally cuts himself. But in the midst of the stormy confrontation, Tony, like most audience members, forgets about that relatively small bruise. Once Sal leaves, Tony starts spending more time with the chef and learns about his life story. Thankfully, things simmer down, he starts taking more of an interest in cooking and goes tuna fishing, which includes killing the fish with a shotgun. To Johnson’s credit, he never tries to glorify what is effectively nostalgia. He doesn’t leave out the unpleasant stuff – Tony’s irresponsible drinking, lying, the crude humour in the kitchen, all of which probably added to his personality. Also, the many humble pies Tony is made to eat over the summer not just to kill his ego, but to make him introspect about who he is. What does he really believe in, as against transmitting a version of himself that people will be in awe of?A still from Tony.Much like in his 2024 debut, 23-year-old Sessa is instantly believable as a lost boat weathering the storms of teenage angst. It’s not a linear story of success, it boils down a man’s legacy to key moments – when a person is made to choose if they have integrity or not. In Miyagi mode, Banderas’s chef has the calm of a veteran, who has dealt with most permutations of life and is therefore graceful even in the face of utter destruction.Matt Johnson’s Tony has all the comfort of a cool beverage on a hot, sunny day. It repositions a cultural rockstar as a wannabe punk – dealing with life’s punches, which eventually contributed to his tough-but-fair demeanour. Despite its familiarity, Johnson’s film rarely feels stale. As the film bookends itself with Tony facing yet another panel. This time for his admission to the Culinary Institute of America, where he’s asked his name. “Anthony Bourdain” comes the response from a boy, who is no longer afraid to admit who he is. *Tony is playing in theatres