Tony cannot make Bourdain cool

The new film leaves you baffled by what the Bourdain cult was ever about

When Anthony Bourdain took his own life in 2018 at the age of 61, the New Statesman’s tribute proclaimed him to be “the food world’s first true rock star”. Tony believes it.

This film – portraying Bourdain at the age of 19, working as a skivvy in a restaurant kitchen in Provincetown, Cape Cod, and discovering his vocation – has been slavishly modelled on all those rock-star biopics that proved so globally profitable, alongside many other by-blow merchandising (repro-musicals, hologram shows, memorabilia exhibitions, and so much more, almost all of it rubbish).

Here we have the origin story of a secular saint, our treasured foodie bad boy – set to a lot of loud rock music, in case we miss the point. We first meet Bourdain (Dominic Sessa), aged 18 or so, curly-haired, cocky and good-looking, taking on three tweedy profs at Vassar College as he applies for a creative writing fellowship. His novel, he claims, will be a combination of Jack Kerouac and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and the first draft will be finished by July.

Afterwards, in a bar, in a leather jacket, he jeers that “these people are so fucking stupid, it’s insane!” Riding his luck, he ballsily – sorry, no other adverbs available – chats up the beautiful Nancy (Emilia Jones) and she encourages him to come and find her, after her summer on Cape Cod, at Vassar in September.

Sessa’s breakout role was as the stranded student Angus in The Holdovers (2023), helped to grasp his life by Paul Giamatti’s even more wrecked teacher. Perfectly cast as a resentful but sensitive adolescent, he seemed then to have the talent and unusual looks of a young Adam Driver. As Bourdain, though, he overplays both the punkiness and the angst, grotesquely self-absorbed in every scene, slouching along, leaning forward, tilting his head tragically like Princess Diana, making eyes, grimacing as if he were the only person ever to have felt anything so much in the history of the world. Forget Adrian Mole and Kevin the Teenager. Meet Tony.

Tony doesn’t get the fellowship but pretends he did and sets off to Provincetown in pursuit of Nancy. After finding her working in a pizzeria and in cahoots with another guy, he ends up hopelessly drunk in a restaurant in front of a plate of oysters, boasting to the waitress that he first ate them in France when he was a kid: “They tasted like the future, I said.”

This anecdote of crazy gastronomic courage, oft recited in Bourdain’s legend of himself, dismally re-enacted 30 years later for A Cook’s Tour, sets off a repeated use of oysters throughout the film as a symbolic challenge and winning love gift. Are oysters so extreme? At a Leclerc supermarket in France, I once witnessed a two-year-old greedily demanding one free sample after another from a promotional stand. After that, any admiration I’d had for young Anthony’s punkishness shrank considerably.

The film’s source, Kitchen Confidential, has been tidied up by director-scriptwriter Matt Johnson (whose previous film was Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie) into a conventional emergence-of-the-hero narrative. Bourdain admits that his dish-washing job in Provincetown was arranged by a roommate. Here, after being dramatically thrown out on the street, blind drunk, he is given a place to sleep, a job in the kitchen and life guidance by the restaurant’s owner, the composite figure “Chef”, charismatic, experienced and mystically wise – and played by none other than the irresistible Antonio Banderas (outrageous casting).

Although still mooning around self-pityingly, Tony wins the respect of the incredibly druggy, violent, foul-mouthed and sex-mad crew in the kitchen in a series of montages set to pounding music. After inspiring them to concoct a more advanced “special” of the day (lobster thermidor, heck), resulting in a disastrous fire, he brings the whole community together in a folksy clambake fundraiser for Chef on the beach. With Chef’s reference, he’s accepted into the Culinary Institute of America. He gets the girl. So here’s the Anthony Bourdain myth assumed, perpetuated, celebrated. Yet the film leaves you baffled by what the Bourdain cult was ever about. He was “a celebrity-chef-cum-writer who was neither a great chef nor a good writer”, this magazine concluded last year. Some kind of rock star nevertheless? If you say so. For sympathetic unselfishness, however, you still can’t beat an oyster.

[Further reading: The most powerful man at the Edinburgh Fringe]