“Essentially, I treated the world as my ashtray,” Anthony Bourdain wrote in his bestselling 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential, the book that would eve
“Essentially, I treated the world as my ashtray,” Anthony Bourdain wrote in his bestselling 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential, the book that would eventually spur his television career. “Rudderless and unhappy, I went in with some friends on a summer share in Provincetown, Cape Cod.”
That exact summer—actually, a heavily fictionalized version of it—is the focus of Tony, a fresh A24 film starring The Holdovers breakout Dominic Sessa as a 19-year-old Bourdain. In Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain describes his college-age self as “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless.” Tony uses that line as an epigraph, setting up a story about Bourdain following his high school crush Nancy (Emilia Jones) to Provincetown in hopes of wooing her.
In real life, a newborn Bourdain found much more than romance in Ptown. “I left Provincetown with restaurant experience, a suntan, and an ever-deepening relationship with recreational drugs,” Bourdain said in a 2014 episode of Parts Unknown. “I went to culinary school, then to New York City, and never returned.”
Only a scant portion of Kitchen Confidential covers this time in Bourdain’s life. Tony sets out to capture Bourdain’s reckless summer on the coast more fully, though it’s certainly not a documentary. Director Matt Johnson and co-screenwriters Todd Bartels and Lou Howe cared most about getting the “vibe” of a newborn Bourdain right; the rest was up for imaginative license.
“When we were first thinking about Bourdain as a subject, it felt like there were three options for windows [into his life],” Howe tells Vanity Fair. The team had no interest in a classic “cradle to grave” biopic; they also didn’t want to make a movie about his time working as a chef in New York. “We really thought that Tony deserved a movie that is as dynamic and entertaining as he was. The question of how that little shit became this sort of guru-like beacon of curiosity really drove us towards Provincetown. Everyone we met there who had spent time in the ’70s talked about how special and weird and magical those times were, so just being there really solidified that choice of, ‘We want to see how this angry little punk started to figure out the path towards enlightenment.’”
So they settled on making a film focused on one meaningful slice of Bourdain’s life. Tony is “a coming-of-age movie, a romance movie, a mentorship, a friendship, a ‘pirate ship’ movie,” says Bartels. (Bourdain loved to liken kitchen staff to a ragtag nautical crew.) “We were writing a love letter to Anthony Bourdain.”
Bourdain died by suicide at the age of 61 on June 8, 2018, while filming an episode of his CNN series Parts Unknown in France. His prolific television career and various books gave Tony’s team some source material. But his larger-than-life legacy also inspired them to take certain liberties, with the permission of Bourdain’s estate.
