Tony gives Anthony Bourdain something worth writing about

We are often asked as adolescents what we want to be when we “grow up” — doctor, lawyer, engineer, the usual respectable pursuits to pluck from. Embedded in the question is an assumption that maturity and wisdom simply arrive as natural side effects of aging into our careers. As filmmaker Matt Johnson’s Tony, a fictionalized biopic about Anthony Bourdain’s formative years, reminds us, growing older offers no such guarantee.The film introduces us to a 19-year-old Bourdain. I knew very little about his early years — I had always imagined he came out of the womb chain-smoking cigarettes and slurping oysters. Dominic Sessa portrays this incipient personality with great charm, capturing his awkward charisma and prodigious ambition, coupled with very little discipline and, of course, an affinity for oysters and cigarettes.What follows is a beautiful film about mentorship and finding purpose in hard work. Enrolled at Vassar College, Bourdain aspires to be a novelist. As the maxim goes, “write what you know.” At this point in his life, however, Tony knows very little beyond the borrowed ideas from Jack Kerouac and George Orwell he has memorized. “Do you know what providence means?” he asks a girl, trying to impress her. “It means God is finally paying attention to me.”Bourdain later described his younger self as a “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout,” adding that he was “badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”Johnson takes him at his word.Tony soon arrives in Provincetown in pursuit of Nancy (Emilia Jones), a crush he has been courting partly through touting the fiction that he is a serious writer. After a drunken stupor ends with him being punched out, robbed, and essentially homeless, Bourdain winds up washing dishes at a local seafood restaurant. Its proprietor, known simply as Chef (Antonio Banderas), takes him in and becomes the stern paternal presence Tony has lacked.Johnson gradually conveys how Bourdain’s superficial artifice begins to wane. Tony arrives believing intellectual work places him above the men laboring in this cramped kitchen. Yet these men can actually do things. They can shuck an oyster, fillet a fish, and produce something tangible. Tony, who has spent much of his young life cultivating the appearance of sophistication, encounters competence for the first time as a virtue unto itself.Banderas’s Chef embodies this beautifully. He is a scruffy, masculine Hemingway archetype: well-traveled, skilled in his craft, living beside the sea, catching his own food, and drinking hard, harsh liquor. His cool, serene countenance inspires confidence by mere presence alone. Without changing a beat, Banderas could comfortably wander into an adaptation of The Old Man and the Sea.Seeing Tony’s potential with the prowess of an NFL scout, Chef plucks him from narcissistic delusion and gives him purpose and a place to learn real-life skills — something more practical than all that pretentious literary stuff he kept spewing like a sneeze. In one memorable scene, Chef insists that Tony accompany him to church. When Tony flaunts his skepticism, Chef replies, “That’s like saying you don’t believe in air. You’re still breathing, aren’t you?”The film’s other great influence pulls him in the opposite direction. Sal, played by Leo Woodall with a much-needed dose of wanton debauchery, bolsters Tony’s confidence, teaches him how to flirt with women, and introduces him to cocaine. Johnson frames Bourdain’s coming of age around these competing mentors: a devil and a saint. Chef teaches discipline and craft; Sal teaches appetite and abandon. Growing up requires Tony to develop the judgment to distinguish which lessons will sustain him and which will eventually destroy him.We have long standardized university as the default path toward security and adulthood after high school. Tony initially follows that respectable script and learns how to sound educated, but he lacks original ideas. Far from the middle-class confines of his upbringing, Provincetown teaches him the dignity that comes from working with his hands and creating something tangible, an education his liberal-arts lecture halls had failed to provide.The irony is that Bourdain does eventually become the writer he always wanted to be. Before entering the kitchen, he possesses literary ambition without material. He wants desperately to tell stories before he has lived enough life to understand one. The kitchen gives him stories.WHAT THE WNBA OWES ENES KANTER, BY ITS OWN LOGICAt his core, Bourdain was always a storyteller. Good, honest stories reveal facets of the human experience, and food is inseparable from that humanity. This, more than anything, is what drew Bourdain to kitchens and food. Beyond the addictive personality, the danger, and the excess, what fascinated him was people and the way they lived.The film is bookended by two admissions interviews. The first features a condescending and uncouth “Tony” pitching a half-baked idea for a book to his liberal arts professors. The second, in the film’s coda, shows a sobered and serious Anthony Bourdain who has finally found a medium through which to channel his ambitions. He finally grew up.Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.