‘Tony’ review: Late Anthony Bourdain is turned into a coming-of-age movie hero

I can’t say I had “No Reservations” when it was announced that an Anthony Bourdain biopic was in the works. I had plenty.

How could any movie about the bad-boy chef, author and TV star escape the dark cloud of his shocking 2018 death by suicide? Or would stopping the story before that horrible day do the complicated subject, who was just as uncompromised and probing on his travel shows as any journalist, a disservice? A no-win situation, you’d think.

Yet supremely likable “Tony” mostly solves the problem by focusing as tightly as possible on his first formative summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as an overconfident 19-year-old rebel without a cassoulet. And that memorable experience, which introduced him to the intoxicating world of kitchens and food, becomes a textbook coming-of-age film.

Really, if a viewer doesn’t know Bourdain from Pepin, “Tony” would play as a highly entertaining, heart-tugging and fictional boy-to-man vacation flick, like “The Way Way Back.” 

For the food celeb’s fans, the movie still mostly does, even if, like coming across an old photograph from a breezier time, there is the unavoidable occasional pang of sadness.

Bourdain once wrote of his early turning point, the summer of 1973, in a Salon essay. 

“I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” he said.

That ruthlessly reflective quote also acts as “Tony”’s logline.

In giving Bourdain the Hollywood treatment, director and co-writer Matt Johnston seizes that diagnosis and segments of his memoir “Kitchen Confidential” while playing fast and loose with specific facts. And that’s fine. The film has no illusions of being Tonypedia. 

So, in this almost mythic telling he heads to Cape Cod on the winds of a lie. Tony (Dominic Sessa) tells a girl he’s got the hots for that he’s just been selected for a coveted writing fellowship. He has not.

Without any discernible plan, he bolts from his parents’ New Jersey home and pursues Nancy (Emilia Jones) to Provincetown, where she works at a pizza place. Tony fibs he’s there to write. Again, he’s not. He’s a jobless, aimless, belligerent drunk — albeit a creative one. 

On his first day in the beach town, his appetite of booze and his uncontrollable mouth gets him beaten up and kicked to the curb by a grungy seafood restaurant’s chef (Antonio Banderas) and one of his cooks, the working-class Cassanova Sal (Leo Woodall, great in everything).

In typical Bourdain fashion, 24 hours later he’s living out of a hammock on Chef’s porch and doing dishes in the kitchen to make money to get home.

The 1970s always make a fun setting for this scrappy genre of movie. That decade’s sexuality, complete indifference to health, couldn’t-care-less parents, lack of cellphones, flagrant political incorrectness and pre-consumerism personalities gives simple plots scorching heat and vitality.

If “Tony” were set today, he’d silently text for hours, his mom would check “Find My” on her iPhone and go pick him up. Roll the credits.

Curly-haired, puckish Sessa, the breakout star of the ‘70s-set “The Holdovers,” must have come to us via an avocado-green time machine. He belongs, physically and spiritually, in this decade. Vitally, the lanky actor brilliantly captures the tricky quality that powered Bourdain’s entire career — that he was a jackass who everybody liked.

That trait, he discovered, made him a natural fit for the hot-tempered world of professional cooking. Sessa’s Tony makes many objectionable choices, but he’s always our guy.

At the Flagship (a stand-in for the real Dreadnought), Tony works along filthy, vulgar slobs like oyster-shucker Sal, Stavros (Stavros Halkias) and Tyrone (Michael Jibrin). We watch in horror as human beings consume these pigs’ food.

But Tony is entranced. A very real event is depicted. Early in his career, Bourdain caught a chef (the roguish Sal here) he was working with banging the bride at a wedding reception. To him, that was a magical sight.

Of course, Bourdain became a chef himself and had great respect for disciplined, hard-working (not just hard-living) culinary leaders. That’s what the secretive and intense Banderas’ amalgam character represents — serious mentors who inspired him to believe food could mean more than sustenance or a paycheck.

The upbeat end of “Tony” would normally leave us on a high. The promising young cook is interviewing to attend the Culinary Institute of America and forge a new path. Bourdain’s friend Eric Ripert of Le Bernadin plays one of the questioners. The vibe is the same as Anne Hathaway’s character in “The Devil Wears Prada” applying to work at a newspaper.

However, our carefree summer is over and a small September chill creeps in. 

Johnston’s movie can’t completely make us forget a pretty recent tragedy. 

But at its lovable best, “Tony” fondly reminds us of the man who could never shoot a successful fishing segment, went on headpounding benders in Greece and helped teach the world that food could change lives.