Dallas Film Now.

The loss of writer, traveler, and television personality Anthony Bourdain was a huge loss. As a fan of both his culinary adventures and snarky writings, Bourdain cut a blazing path of irreplaceable entertainment and commentary But, the most heartening thing about his on-air personality over the years (whether by shrewd marketing design or his own self-realization) was his evolution of philosophical outlook about, well, pretty much all aspects of humanity.

When he began on television in the mid-aughts with No Reservations, the appeal of a man snidely (and at times cringeworthily) traversing the globe, gulping down food both exotic and elite, and commenting on events with now anachronistic analogies to Lindsey Lohan or boy bands, fit right into the wheelhouse of the burgeoning reality television boom. Basically, the “bad boy” veneer of his bestselling memoir “Kitchen Confidential” jumped off the page and into our living rooms, not to be outdone by any number of other ‘chefs-turned-provocateur’ doing the same things. People wanted to see faraway places and watch someone eat monkey brains or piles of fried ants

When he left that first show and hosted Parts Unknown for CNN in 2013, Bourdain’s image softened a bit. Although the snark was always brimming at the edges, he seemed to be a man at peace with his world…. able to sit back and enjoy, record, and comment on the small beauties of life. Whether he enjoyed a community cook-out with a huge family or allowed for the passionate discussion with a local person decrying the loss of public beaches within a country hellbent on swallowing all the land for private resorts, Bourdain assuredly found his footing as a documenter of the world’s unsettling current events. It solidified his personality as something more than Exotic Food Man number two, and it was beautiful to watch. All of this made his untimely death in 2018 all the more gutting.

Matt Johnson’s new film, Tony, doesn’t choose to be an all-encompassing biography about Bourdain from cradle to grave. Instead, it’s micro-focused on just three months of his life. And like the growth that I greatly enjoyed over a dozen or so years on television, the film does a winning job of allowing the same humanistic needle-drops of life serve as the backdrop for a film that, in any other universe, would be a pretty darn good foodie superhero origin story.

Picking up with young Bourdain (played by Dominic Sessa) as his punky attitude and extreme ego see him abandoning his upper middle class East Coast home and running away to the salty airs of Provincetown for a summer, Tony pulls pretty regularly from Bourdain’s writings in an episodic manner. He washes up in this coastal town of rejects, vacationers, hippies, and college students where he promptly finds work as a dishwasher in a small restaurant. Naturally, the restaurant (owned by chef Antonio Banderas in a naturalistic and quiet performance) serves as a metaphor for life where young Bourdain learns not only the nuances of food industry service, but the beats of real life.

Mixed into his daily doses of adulthood, of course, there’s a female love interest in Nancy (Emilia Jones), a surly coworker whose fists are far faster than his mind (Leo Woodall), and a small band of motley kitchen workers who will come to exist as both louts and gods within Bourdain’s memoirs. All of these aspects are given time to breathe and grow within the film while staying focused on their irreversible impact on his eventual chef’s life.

Spanning just these summer months where Bourdain claimed to have been propelled towards a career in food service, Johnson’s film does a nice job of hitting all the marks. While I had a hard time seeing Sessa as Tony (something I don’t know anyone could actually pull off), Johnson’s film makes its largest impact in the edges of biography. Young Bourdain makes plenty of dumb-headed mistakes…. mistakes that make for a good three-act structure. But Tony also finds the beauty in beach-front clam bakes and the internal happiness of creating a meal for someone sitting ten feet away, carefully watching every inch of their face as they take that first bite. These were the important moments for Bourdain, and Tony emphasizes them in a film that wisely captures the creative awakening in a man who would shine brightly for years to come.

Tony opens wide in the Dallas and Fort Worth area on Friday August 21st.