You can barely have the TV on for five minutes without Gordon Ramsay, Nigella Lawson or, my personal favourite, Guy Fieri showing up. Chefs and cooking shows are big business. So, given the film industry’s reliance on biopics, it felt inevitable that a few films about culinary greats would come around – and it’s no surprise that Anthony Bourdain is the subject of the first.
His influence on popular culture is hard to ignore: the bestselling books, international TV shows and the way he transformed the idea of what a chef could be, not to mention his bad-boy reputation. Yet it all started much more modestly when, at 19, he was rejected for a writing scholarship and, seemingly with no real plan, followed a school crush out to Provincetown, Cape Cod, for the summer of 1975.
Slender, slightly hunched, sporting a mop of fuzzy hair and leather jackets, Tony has the insecure, slightly deadbeat air of a young man who doesn’t quite know himself or what to do with himself. His lying, like that of many naïve youngsters, feels less like calculated deception than an attempt to construct a more interesting version of himself – one his crush might embrace and his mum might accept.
Dominic Sessa plays his quiet physicality well, with a pent up frustration and a thinly veiled bravado to mask his insecurity.
When Tony’s Cape Cod adventure – unsurprisingly – doesn’t get off to a good start, it takes a drunken encounter to give him some direction, landing him a job washing dishes in a restaurant. The Flagship kitchen is a world of sharp knives and even sharper banter, rough-edged masculine energy, and Tony begins to find something he has been missing: belonging.
Two figures quickly define his summer. Sal (Leo Woodall), all winking rough-around-the-edges charm, represents the dead-end pull of drugs, drift and a kind of aimless, self-destructive masculinity. Ciro (Antonio Banderas), the owner of The Flagship restaurant and a devout Catholic, offers the opposite: discipline, craft and a path towards culinary excellence. Between them, Tony is introduced not only to cooking, but to the competing futures that might define his life. One world asks him to make something of himself; the other allows him to disappear.
As the second half of the film progresses, cooking – and the beauty of it – increasingly comes to the fore. Tony begins to fall in love with dusty recipe books, precise meal prep and late-night fishing. For the first time, there is a sense that this drifting young man might have found something worth committing to.
The film’s music follows that shift. It initially gives the film a restless, youthful energy – The Modern Lovers, The Stooges, Kool and The Gang – but gradually makes room for something more contemplative. Karen Dalton’s Something on Your Mind and Richard and Linda Thompson’s The Calvary Cross bring a melancholy that feels increasingly significant. Even Patti Page’s Old Cape Cod adds to the nostalgia.
There is a brief but telling allusion to Bourdain’s eventual fate through François Vatel, the celebrated French chef who died by suicide. It hangs over the film with uncomfortable weight. Tony’s insecurity and self-loathing, initially played as youthful awkwardness, acquire a tragic resonance.
This is another win for director Matt Johnson, who is developing a knack for making biopics that feel fresh and palatable. Following BlackBerry, he again finds a way to make a familiar story feel intimate and alive. By focusing on one summer rather than an entire life, he captures Bourdain before the legend – a lost 19-year-old trying to work out who he might become. It’s a portrait of youthful masculinity that will strike a chord with many.
