Why Anthony Bourdain biopic ‘Tony’ puts truth on the back burner
The makers of the biopic explain why they invented characters and made Bourdain’s on-screen experiences link to those of star Dominic Sessa
In the second film of the summer that smooths the rough edges of a complicated man, we meet the future chef and global TV star Anthony Bourdain (played by Dominic Sessa) at age 19, blustering through a comically pretentious fellowship proposal for the dour-faced members of a faculty committee at New York State’s Vassar College.
At first, this young Bourdain is easy to imagine as a slightly older version of Sessa’s breakout role in The Holdovers (2023), as if the earlier film’s sullen and arrogant school student was now a sullen and arrogant college student – without the emotional growth brought about by Paul Giamatti’s dysfunctional history teacher.
“What I’m trying to do,” Sessa’s overly confident Bourdain tells the professors, “is create a metaphorical conversation between George Orwell and Jack Kerouac, as if Down and Out in Paris and London was typed out on one long piece of paper.”
He is referencing the now-totemic scroll on which a Benzedrine-fuelled Kerouac typed On the Road – the novel’s taped-together pages sold for US$12.1 million at auction in March – as well as the Orwell book that the real Bourdain once called “a template and an inspiration” for his bestselling memoir and chef-culture tell-all Kitchen Confidential.
Of course, the real Bourdain did not propose such a ludicrous project, which the film professors pass on after he had already boasted to his family and friends that he had got the fellowship.