When Tony Met Anthony

Remember when I said we were going to have a Shards summer? I fear I may have spoken too soon. Watching the FX series’ second episode, I was regretfully reminded that these days, Ryan Murphy still knows how to make an incredible pilot, and not much else - at least the kids are all right and making the most of their impeccably styled press junket. August has always presented itself as a season of beginnings and ends for me, marking the bittersweet farewell of another summer, the impending fashion week season, and celebrating another momentous year (my seventh) in the city. 🤍 Recent happenings include running Manhattan’s Summer Streets, dreaming of Kijitora’s Yuzu Cream Top Matcha, and seeing Olivia Dean live at Madison Square Garden next week (!)

Tony, dir. Matt Johnson 🎞️

Even to those whose knowledge of Anthony Bourdain is limited, the revered late celebrity chef and writer has always presented as one of those indelible figures whose towering cultural influence feels near impossible to recapture. Tony, directed by Matt Johnson, understands the delicate responsibility of its undertaking, subverting the expectations of a formulaic biopic to deliver an amiable bildungsroman that takes its audience back to the artist’s early beginnings, long before his hagiographic persona came to be. Tony follows a singular summer in Anthony Bourdain’s life, in which a presumptuous nineteen-year-old ‘Tony’ travels to Provincetown in pursuit of writerly inspiration, stumbling into the chaotic world of a restaurant kitchen that proves formative to the rest of his life.

While most biopics introduce us to an artist who has already harnessed their inherent gift, here we get to witness the slow-burn discovery of an artist’s calling. Despite our hindsight of knowing the insurmountable heights that Bourdain’s celebrity would come to reach, Tony never frames the guidance received from Antonio Banderas’ Chef as a prodigous undertaking, rather an understanding between an artist with a life already lived and one just beginning his own, inadvertently seeking a mutual discipline to nurture and give shape to purpose.1 It’s impossible not to root for Dominic Sessa, whose uniquely expressive physicality lends itself so beautifully to a young Bourdain’s brashness and vulnerability, Leo Woodall commits to a New York accent so ridiculous that it actually works, and Emilia Jones gives a reliably sincere performance as Tony’s musing first love, lending the film much of its beating heart (‘I want you to take my photo because I like the way I feel when you look at me,’ might be one of the sweetest lines ever put to film).

Matt Johnson, also behind Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, one of the other more earnest (albeit sillier) films of the year, has polished his fly-on-the-wall filmmaking that works wonders for the nostalgic portrait of an introspective passing summer. Shot on location in a dreamy seventies’ Provincetown, some of Johnson’s most exemplary filmmaking takes place when Tony, in describing his perfectly imagined day as a writer, is instead shown devotedly working another day at the restaurant, a meditative existence enriched by the impassioned community that surrounds him. Johnson beautifully captures the intimacy of cooking, finding the tender allure in making ketchup from scratch, shucking an oyster, and firing up a clam bake on the beach. As the film’s epilogue sweetly brings us to the beginning of Bourdain’s bourgeoning career as we would come to know it, I found myself wiping away tears, moved by the film’s tender admission of wanting to do something meaningful with one’s life, not yet knowing how or where to find that calling, but choosing to try anyway. In theaters.

+ more films and specials I watched recently and loved:

• Mary Beth Barone: Galaxy Brain, dir. Ky Newman

• Spider-Man: Brand New Day, dir. Destin Daniel Cretton

• Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, dir. Jane Schoenbrun

On Repeat 🎧 ✨

+ new albums I’ve been listening to on repeat, for your hyperfixation consideration:

• The Naijamerican Dream, Adanna Duru

• Therapy At The Club, FLO

• No Me Arrepiento De Sentir Tanto, Karol G

• Blue Island, Ravyn Lenae