Seacia Pavao/a24 Hide Caption

Tony focuses on just a splinter of Anthony Bourdain's life — the mid-1970s summer when he was 19. Above, Antonio Banderas as Chef, and Dominic Sessa as a young Anthony Bourdain.'/> The internationally known chef, writer, and television star died in 2018. Tony, starring Dominic Sessa, tells just a splinter of Bourdain's life — the mid-1970s summer when he was 19. (Image credit: Seacia Pavao). The new film Tony focuses on just a splinter of Anthony Bourdain's life — the mid-1970s summer when he was 19. Above, Antonio Banderas as Chef, and Dominic Sessa as a young Anthony Bourdain. Seacia Pavao/A24 hide caption.

A couple of decades ago, I lived for a year in Singapore. The question I was asked most often was, "Do you know Anthony Bourdain? He was an idol there.

But not only there. Because his TV shows aired in almost every country, people everywhere knew him and saw him as an embodiment of what they liked about America. Bourdain was indisputably Cool, with an aura of disreputable fun, but also generous and open to different cultures.

Genuinely worldly, he didn't treat other societies' food as weird, but as delicious, and rooted in things that matter. We see the blossoming of that openness in Tony, an amusing new movie based on a few pages from his breakthrough book, Kitchen Confidential. Taking a splinter of Bourdain's life — the mid-1970s summer when he was 19 — director Matt Johnson sidesteps the touch-all-the-bases sludge of a biopic.

Instead, Tony captures a few telling moments in the life of a wine-dark soul who was, as Homer said of Odysseus, "the man of twists and turns. Bourdain died by suicide in 2018. When we first meet Bourdain — played by lanky Dominic Sessa — he's an annoyingly brash, deeply insecure Vassar student. A would-be writer, he's trying to B.S. a literary fellowship committee into funding a novel that's a dialogue between Jack Kerouac and George Orwell.

He calls the book a bildungsroman, the German term for the literary genre that tracks a person's moral and emotional growth. Naturally, it's Tony's own growth we'll be watching. When the fellowship doesn't pan out, he heads off to a strangely un-gay Provincetown in hopes of romancing a fellow student, Nancy — that's Emilia Jones from CODA.

But he soon finds himself broke and alone. He's rescued by a man known simply as Chef, played by Antonio Banderas, whose sly, sneaky deep performance may well win him an Oscar. Chef lets him sleep on a hammock outside his house, and when Tony lies that he knows about kitchens, hires him to work in the back of his bare-bones seafood restaurant.

Away from work, Tony falls under the sway of his co-worker Sal, played with thuggish panache by rising star Leo Woodall, who's the movie's exemplar of the bad boy chef. Sal steals, beats people up, collects notches from the door frames of women he sleeps with, and gives Tony cocaine in the kitchen. Tony's summer becomes a dialogue between the sociopathic Sal, who pulls him toward the self-destructive darkness that would eventually claim him, and the humane, almost saintly Chef, who helps him tap into the bigheartedness that would make him beloved.

Along the way, Tony finds a calling. He discovers his love of kitchen culture — with its culinary rituals, jocular camaraderie, amphetamine-rush need to get the dishes out, and underlying sense that there's something hallowed in the communal act of eating. As an origin story, Tony is a tad too neat, yet vastly better than you get in comic book movies whose heroes are transformed by bites from radioactive spiders.

From the start, we realize that Tony's surface bravado has no weight. Groping to find his identity, he has the uncoolness of a kid pretending to be cool. This is nicely pulled off by Sessa, a terrific young actor whom you may know as Paul Giamatti 's student sidekick in The Holdovers.