Dominic Sessa Summons the Rapscallion Spirit of Anthony Bourdain in the Exhilarating, Tender Tony

Before the late Anthony Bourdain was a charismatic, adventurous TV personality—and even before he’d become a best-selling writer, with his fantastically disreputable 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential—he was a bright but annoying kid enrolled at Vassar and, as he himself has said, “badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” Matt Johnson’s exhilarating and tender film Tony is only sort-of a biopic: It covers just a few months of Bourdain’s life, the summer of 1975, which he spent sweating away in the kitchen of a small, bustling restaurant in Provincetown. But it’s a captivating origin story, detailing the bumpy rise of a ne’er-do-well who made good, even as he lied, cheated, and partied his way through one gloriously wayward, depraved summer.Dominic Sessa—who gave the soulful, bratty performance at the center of Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers—stars as 19-year-old Anthony, only back in 1975, he preferred the breezier, shortened version of his name. After failing to get the writer’s fellowship he’d applied for, he leaves his family’s home in New Jersey and heads to Provincetown, in pursuit of the girl he has a crush on, Emilia Jones’s Nancy. Distraught at learning that she already seems to...