I can’t say I’ve ever really felt much for Anthony Bourdain, positively or negatively. I’m not a foodie (though I occasionally eat “food”), so he largely flew under my radar, even knowing that his whole thing was that he was far from being your average chef and far from being your average host of food shows. What little I did know about him, though, was fascinating, and the few glimpses of No Reservations I caught in out-of-context clips on social media were relatively entertaining or enlightening. All this to say, I had little to no interest in Tony when initially learning of it, but given how director Matt Johnson pulled off back-to-back miracles with BlackBerry and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, I had faith that this would be, like Bourdain himself, far from the average biopic. I was correct: Tony is far from the average biopic, because it’s not a good biopic, unless you want to watch an unlikeable and unremarkable character lie for his own personal gain over the course of a summer.

College student Tony (Dominic Sessa) has hopes of being a writer, but when he fails to earn a writing fellowship that would have gotten him away from his family for the summer, he instead decides to chase Nancy (Emilia Jones) to Provincetown, because he has a crush on her and she sort of kind of maybe barely flirted with him once. Once he arrives, he has no money and no job and no place to stay, though a local chef (Antonio Banderas) needs a dishwasher, so Tony trades his services to be able to sleep on this chef’s backyard hammock. Tony learns about the debauchery that goes on in most kitchens, from unhygienic practices to drug use, while spending his off-hours trying to sleep with Nancy. After spending the whole summer being a lying dirtbag, he finds the experience has awoken a new passion in him for cooking.

The movie opens with a quote from Bourdain himself: “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” This is a mostly accurate description of the character of “Tony” we meet in this movie, yet there are no substantial components of him that are endearing or charming. In some senses, I appreciate that Sessa and Johnson delivered such an unexceptional and irritating character, when it would have been easy for a biopic to make your protagonist the de facto hero. In other senses, though, Tony is aggravating from moment one and for no real reason. Sessa’s role in The Holdovers, on the other hand, saw him embrace similar character traits to Tony, though the audience could witness why that character was so indignant; Tony is an unlikeable prick from the moment we meet him, and, as he spends the movie being spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless, he never gets all that endearing. Those who already have a built-in emotional connection to Anthony Bourdain, the real person, might have an inherent connection to Tony, though without that, spending an hour and 45 minutes with someone irritating makes for an underwhelming experience.

In this sense, Sessa is effective in aggravating the audience, and the rest of the supporting cast are all perfectly adequate. Banderas is as gruff as necessary, but shows restraint from becoming a full-blown caricature. Jones is fine as Tony’s love interest, even though it’s hard to see what she finds charming about him, and Leo Woodall makes for an engaging presence who occasionally lures Tony down a darker path. It’s hard not to enjoy seeing Stavros Halkias essentially play himself in the movie (he’s literally named Stavros), with some of his comedy being the closest I got to actually laughing, as opposed to merely thinking, “Hmm, that’s funny,” and I’m not really ever going to complain about seeing him in a movie.

Much like last year’s Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, even though you could have made a riveting movie that chronicled all of Bourdain’s life, Tony instead chooses to focus on these specific months. And, much like Deliver Me from Nowhere, it leaves me wondering, “But why these specific months?” With Deliver Me from Nowhere, it was based on a book from this specific period, yet with Tony, it felt like it was meant to be an origin story where I felt I never really learned much about who Bourdain really was. We don’t see him as a talented chef and we don’t see him as a talented writer, so there’s nothing that makes me want to see what happens to this guy after the credits roll. Strip away the legacy of Bourdain and treat this merely as a movie about a guy who happens to be named Tony, you’re still left with a movie about a guy who lies to everyone for personal gain, gets into drugs, and ultimately realizes, “Hey, maybe I should try cooking!” The only real reminder that this figure would go on to be a world-renowned chef and author is the groan-inducing moment highlighted in the trailer where he is asked his name and he basically looks directly at the camera and says, “Anthony Bourdain.”

Now, I understand that it could cause some blowback from anyone reading this, saying, “Well, of course you didn’t like it, you don’t know Anthony Bourdain!” However, I’m of the mind that you shouldn’t need to have a preexisting connection to an individual to be engaged by their biopic. To that, I say, I didn’t know shit about Robert J. Oppenheimer! Or about Mark Zuckerberg! Or about that guy whose arm got stuck in a rock for 127 hours and he had to chop it off! Point being, you shouldn’t be expected to have a built-in enthusiasm for the real-life figure that inspired a biopic, as the movie should stand on its own merits. It’s like when a movie gets poor reviews that cite a reboot or sequel or adaptation will only appeal to fans, and filmmakers defend the movie with, “Yes, of course we made it for fans! We want to make fans happy!” Well, maybe making something that could transform newcomers into fans would also be good.

In June of 2018, my mom died. You could say this was a, well, “not fun” time in my life. A week later, Anthony Bourdain died. Seeing so many tributes to him at a time I was going through some pretty miserable stuff gave me an affinity towards him, despite never actually investing in learning more about him. What prevented me from doing so is largely my passionate disinterest in restaurant culture and how intrinsically linked to that world he was. Yes, I knew he loved going to In-N-Out and he wasn’t a pretentious chef, but having personally spent enough time around so many degenerates who took pride in their deabuchery in restaurants has always been a turn-off to that entire culture. I came into Tony hoping that this would be the movie that finally pushed me over the edge into actually learning more about Bourdain and his accomplishments, and while I don’t think the movie itself makes me like him less, I’m just as disinterested in learning more about restaurant culture as I was before watching.

If you already have a built-in affinity for the real-world Bourdain, you’ll likely appreciate seeing a fictionalized version of events he’s recounted multiple times (even with how little I know about him, I’ve heard many stories about his time in kitchens when he was young). Knowing just how acclaimed and how insightful he was in the food world, seeing his transformation from a wannabe writer into someone devoted to changing people’s lives with meals is sure to impact you. If you don’t already love Bourdain, though, Tony just feels like watching four mid-season episodes of The Bear without context, wondering why you’re watching these irritating people without a compelling reason to like them. and ending the narrative at a point where it feels like the story is just beginning.

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