Watching a biopic, or reviewing one, I can’t say that I’ve ever spent much time wondering what the subject of the movie might think of it. Would James Brown have liked “Get On Up,” the superb 2014 drama about him? He would probably have found something in it to gripe about. Elton John lovingly endorsed “Rocketman,” the 2019 film about him that I thought was a laughably inauthentic piece of junk.
But as I watched “Tony,” Matt Johnson’s drama about the young Anthony Bourdain and the summer he spent in Provincetown working in a restaurant kitchen for the first time, I couldn’t help but wonder what Bourdain would have made of the movie. How could you not wonder? He was too opinionated, too no bullshit, too much of a movie fanatic, too much the kind of guy who would greet a film about him not by feeling flattered but by pissing all over it because it had missed the real story. To me, if an Anthony Bourdain biopic can’t clear the bar called “Bourdain would have liked it,” it’s probably not a good movie.
“Tony” clears that bar. It’s true to what happened to Bourdain in 1975, when he was a restless 19-year-old college student spending the summer in Provincetown. The movie is structured as a romance, and some of it is fictionalized, but it’s true to the person he was and was becoming: a charmer, a troublemaker, a middle-class Jersey refugee with some serious demons, an aspiring writer with an extraordinary gift of gab, a sweet kid, a hustler, and an asshole. “Tony” has been framed as the origin story of how Anthony Bourdain became Anthony Bourdain. But one of the many things that Matt Johnson, the director of “Blackberry” and “Nirvana The Band the Show the Movie,” understands is that Anthony — or, as he called himself then, Tony — already was Anthony Bourdain.
