Tony

It’s ‘Anthony Bourdain: The SpongeBob Years’ in this seaside coming-of-age story about the much-mourned chef, writer and globe-trotting gastronaut. With The Holdovers’ Dominic Sessa playing Bourdain as a restless 19-year-old, Tony is nearly two hours of crustacean chopping and lying to girls at Cape Cod’s answer to the Krusty Krab restaurant. There’s even a starring role for old Burger Beard himself, Antonio Banderas, as this film’s answer to Mr Krabs, a trusting restaurateur who points the tearaway in the right direction. It’s loosely based on a few chapters of Bourdain’s fabulously indiscreet restaurateur confessional Kitchen Confidential. Unfortunately, that rich stew is here somehow rendered thin and flavourless.

Bourdain is introduced as a fledgling writer and full-time bullshit artist, trying to blag a college fellowship to pen his own collision of Kerouac and Orwell. His main focus, though, is on impressing the unattainable Nancy (Coda’s Emilia Jones) with his intellect and bad-boy vibes. The unironically worn nunchucks prove a powerful deterrent for his fellow student. 

Not having had much luck with the fellowship either, the penniless Bourdain pursues Nancy to the well-heeled island of Cape Cod. It’s 1975, the summer of Jaws, but no shark is more voracious than the boozy, horny Bourdain. Soon, he’s getting turfed out of Banderas’s seafood shack by Leo Woodall’s hard-living, hard-fighting sous chef – the kind of messily compelling character Kitchen Confidential is full of. Or will be, when he writes it. Which is not in this film.

Sessa, all Ramones hair and self-consciously intellectual airs, bears a strong resemblance to a young Bourdain 

The rakish Sessa, all Ramones hair and self-consciously intellectual airs, bears a strong resemblance to a young Bourdain, a culinary rock-star-to-be who finds a father figure in Banderas’s hospitable Ciro. But director Matt Johnson doesn’t drag the same laughs from Bourdain’s excesses as he did with Glenn Howerton’s tech psychopath in BlackBerry. A strangely written character, Banderas’ likeable culinary sensei is happy to be guided by the erratic Bourdain one minute, furiously bollocking him the next. His greatest contribution, aside from loaning him a hammock for the summer, is to encourage him to go with ‘Anthony’ instead of ‘Tony’. (That memo didn’t reach the people who picked the film’s title.) 

Zeroing in on this one chequered summer in Bourdain’s life feels like an odd decision that Johnson and his co-writers (Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe) compound by giving us little to root for in their surly antihero. Even his redemptive moment rings hollow. There was always a roguishness to Bourdain – he wrote about professional kitchens like they were galleys on a buccaneer’s galleon: heady, tempestuous places from which, somehow, immaculate dishes could emerge – but his joy in his craft and his culinary confederates is infectious. Tony captures almost none of that unruly passion, settling instead into a vinegary spin on a summer teen flick. 

Maybe, though, this is one of those rare misfires worth persevering with. Get Sessa’s Bourdain to New York and into the dark heart of Kitchen Confidential and a sequel could be a treat. Or maybe they should have just started there, because Tony is a bland dish. 

In US theaters Aug 7. Out in UK and Ireland cinemas Aug 14