Tony      Director: Matt Johnson Cert: 15AGenre: BiopicStarring: Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, Emilia Jones, Dagmara Domińczyk, Rich Sommer, Stavros Halkias, Leo WoodallRunning Time: 1 hr 47 minsMatt Johnson’s biopic does the sensible thing with the Anthony Bourdain legend: ditches most of it. Wisely eschewing the cradle-to-grave formula, Tony gifts us the kind of compelling bildungsroman the young Bourdain thinks he is going to write. Or at least says he is going to write. Set during one awkward, formative summer in the early 1970s, the eponymous Tony has the swagger of the culinary demimonde he would become. But with nothing to back it up.Brilliantly essayed by Dominic Sessa, he arrives in Provincetown with literary ambitions, an inflated sense of his own importance and puppy love for Nancy (Emilia Jones), the girl he has had a crush on since high school. He’s lucky to end up washing dishes at a seaside tavern and restaurant.Working under a weathered chef (Antonio Banderas, fantastic), the young dropout discovers that food is a world of labour, hierarchy, appetite and craft. The restaurant scenes have an electrifying sense of disorder: cooks bark, banter and sweat while Tony watches, learns and occasionally behaves like an absolute idiot. He is, as Bourdain wrote later, a kid in need of a good ass-kicking. Oyster shucking comes close.Leo Woodall is magnetic as Sal, a hard-living, walking Beat poem, whose reckless confidence seems to prefigure the rock’n’roll persona Bourdain would later inhabit.Sessa is excellent at capturing the contradiction at the centre of Tony: all braggadocio, misplaced goals and elaborate lies, counterpointed by moments of dark sorrow.Johnson lightly pokes fun at the chasm between the main-character energy versus actual accomplishments, without leaning too hard into cringe comedy. The cowriter and director equally resists peppering the two chapters he freely adapted from Kitchen Confidential with origin story gotchas. This is a fond, modest story about a future icon, enlivened by a muscular ensemble cast, Michael Bauman’s cinematography and Jay McCarroll’s music. The film is all the better for it.In cinemas from August 14th