“Tony,” “Late Fame,” and the Rocky Road to Literary Stardom

I mean it as a strange sort of compliment when I say that, for decent stretches of the new biographical drama “Tony,” I came close to forgetting who Tony was—or, more precisely, I forgot about the brash, beloved, outsized, outspoken personality he would become. When we first meet him onscreen, in the spring of 1975, Tony (Dominic Sessa) is a Vassar student, with an unruly mop of hair, a mouth full of pompous put-downs, and a blustery ambition to become a writer. When someone addresses him as Anthony, he waves the name aside, claiming that only his mother calls him that. Through a convoluted chain of events, Tony winds up in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he spends his summer working at a sloppy seafood joint called the Flagship. The chef (a wonderful Antonio Banderas) rechristens him Flaco, a term of endearment, mostly, that lodges in your brain. Not until the closing scenes do we hear Tony’s full name, Anthony Bourdain, spoken aloud, and for many in the audience the moment will land with a satisfying click—the sound of destiny snapping into place. Others, like me, might find themselves jolted back to bio-pic reality: Oh, yeah! That guy.

How could we forget? Bourdain, the celebrity chef who parlayed the success of his best-selling memoir, “Kitchen Confidential” (2000), into an astounding career as a globe-trotting TV host, was often lovingly described as “larger than life.” In the years since his suicide, in 2018, the public’s undimmed affection suggests that he may also be larger than death. He was previously memorialized onscreen in an anguished documentary, “Roadrunner” (2021), that tried to make sense of the exuberant highs and despairing lows of his final years. “Tony,” which was directed and co-written by the Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson, attempts more or less the opposite. Loosely drawn from the Provincetown chapters of “Kitchen Confidential,” the film is a narrow, crowd-pleasing slice of a wildly tumultuous life—a portrait of the culinary artist as an endearing, exasperating young fuckup, set during a summer of squid stews and Wellfleet oysters that changes his life.

“Jaws” is in theatres, and love is in the air. Tony comes to Provincetown in pursuit of his crush, Nancy (Emilia Jones), to whom he lies continually and unconvincingly about his reasons for being there. The Flagship kitchen is basically a fruits de mer frat house, where the kitchen workers, none rougher or funnier than Sal (Leo Woodall), are a bunch of misfits, snorting cocaine off one hand and slamming down plates of French fries with the other. The exception is Banderas’s unnamed chef, a pillar of Jesus-loving rectitude who gives Tony a job, lets him sleep on his porch, and awakens him each morning with a splash of sea water—a bracing dose of tough love. If it’s fairly easy to dissociate “Tony” from its real-life subject, it’s because the script filters Tony’s experience through a not unpleasant haze of coming-of-age clichés: it’s a youthful romance, a goofball gross-out, and a “Karate Kid” fable rolled into one. You might get so caught up in the comedy, familiar beats and all, that you forget you’re watching a bio-pic.

This is all to the good. As Johnson demonstrated in “BlackBerry” (2023), his engrossing drama about the success and failure of the once popular smartphone, he has a knack for spinning real-life events into counterintuitive entertainment. Far too many bio-pics are mere exercises in slobbering idol worship, and most of them are made and marketed on the strength of a physical resemblance between star and subject. Refreshingly, the degree to which Dominic Sessa looks like the young Bourdain—and, specifically, Bourdain before his face was famous—feels piddlingly insignificant here. Watching Sessa, a lean, gangly twentysomething with a viciously compelling scowl, I was reminded less of Bourdain than of Sessa’s own breakthrough role in “The Holdovers” (2023), in which he played another smart, angry, insecure teen-age malcontent who gets stranded during a seasonal holiday and finds an improbable mentor.

Tony, though, has his own unique set of issues. He’s a sloppy drunk, an angry blowhard, and a bit of a klutz, which isn’t ideal in a job where cuts and burns are everyday hazards. But, beneath his comic belligerence, he has a vulnerability that keeps his swagger in check. There’s an early scene in the film, before Tony decamps for Provincetown, in which he lies to his parents about having won a summer writing fellowship. Tony’s braggadocio is only skin deep; watch the shame that clouds his face when his mother, Gladys Bourdain (a coolly incisive Dagmara Dominczyk), corrects his pronunciation of the word “bildungsroman.” (Gladys, a Times copy editor, knew her business; she also proved instrumental in getting “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” her son’s juicy first essay about the restaurant industry, published in The New Yorker, in 1999.)

This Tony, the future bad-boy tell-all insider of the culinary world, is still touchingly unformed—a mortar full of raw, pasty potential, crying out for life experience to pestle him into shape. But what, exactly, will he be ground into—a chef or a scribe? “I’m a writer,” Tony keeps telling people; it’s the identity he’s long clung to, and the only one that gives his shambles of a life meaning. We never see him do any actual writing in the film, and that’s more than O.K.; the last thing we need is another hackneyed spectacle of a young literary genius hunched over his typewriter. What we do see Tony do is cook—shucking oysters, shredding potatoes, and, on a fateful Friday night, plating a lobster thermidor for the girl of his dreams. The kitchen montages are formulaic yet revelatory; Tony loves food, it turns out, as much as he loves words, and Johnson’s film commits to the belief that a writer is ultimately nothing without a subject. Amid the squalor and chaos of a Provincetown kitchen, Anthony Bourdain found his—and Tony did, too.

Bourdain was in his forties when “Kitchen Confidential” was published, and “Tony” ends with that career-igniting milestone still decades away. “Late Fame,” an exquisitely wry and melancholic new drama from the director Kent Jones, approaches the puzzle of a writer’s life and art from the opposite direction. Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), a rumpled-looking Manhattanite in his late sixties or early seventies, was a young man when he wrote a slender volume of poetry titled “Way Past Go”; it was published, in 1979, to some acclaim, including a rave in the Village Voice. Nearly fifty years later, Saxberger’s early burst of literary promise is long forgotten, as are the poems themselves. He works at a post office, a job he’s held for thirty-seven years. Age and alcohol have taken a toll; he’s several years sober but still hangs out at a bar with his buddies, none of whom know about his literary past.

One chilly day, that past comes rushing back. Saxberger is greeted outside his apartment building by Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan), an impassioned young admirer who considers “Way Past Go” a masterpiece: “It’s as if the poems were written yesterday,” he declares. Dafoe, a master of expressive restraint, turns even this first encounter into a small triumph of barely suppressed feeling. A crinkly smile steals across Saxberger’s careworn face, but it’s chased away by genuine shock (“Is this some kind of joke?” he wonders aloud) and more than a hint of skepticism. He’s right to be suspicious. Meyers, an almost parodic vision of an old soul, gushes praise in unfashionably complete sentences. He begs Saxberger to meet with him and his friends—a motley group of writers, artists, critics, and intellectuals, all apparently just as besotted with “Way Past Go” as he is. But Donovan shows us the calculation, verging on disingenuousness, beneath Meyers’s lofty, earnest veneer. Here is a man who believes fervently in his own flattery but also wields it like a weapon.

After some initial reluctance, Saxberger finds himself in a Greenwich Village coffee shop where Meyers and his group regularly hang out. They call themselves the Enthusiasm Society, a name that captures their unironic spirit of cultural advocacy and their instinctive rejection of snark. They extend that enthusiasm to Saxberger immediately, welcoming him into the group and, before long, inviting him to serve as the marquee name for an upcoming event devoted to readings of their work. But, after the initial intoxication of niche celebrity, Saxberger finds himself disadvantaged and disoriented on multiple fronts. He is no longer the vigorous young poet who took inspiration from, and briefly rubbed elbows with, the New American Poetry pioneers of the nineteen-forties and fifties: Robert Creeley, Amiri Baraka, Ed Dorn. Decades out of practice, Saxberger is assailed by writer’s block and confused by the machinations of a modern-day publishing industry that wants to turn his rediscovery into a branding exercise. He also finds himself at odds with his bar buddies, who, in one lacerating scene, respond to Saxberger’s self-disclosure with mocking, philistine incuriosity.

“Late Fame” has its roots in an 1895 novella, by the Viennese writer Arthur Schnitzler, that was, itself, the object of overdue discovery: unpublished during the author’s lifetime, it didn’t appear until 2014. (An English translation came out in 2017.) It was adapted for the screen by Samy Burch, who previously wrote “May December” (2023), Todd Haynes’s slippery comic melodrama about the cinematic exploitation of an old tabloid scandal. The circumstances of “Late Fame” may be less outwardly fraught, but here, as in the earlier film, Burch fleshes out the awkward dynamics of an ill-advised collaboration, in which superficial pleasantries hide the petty motives and desires of all involved. And, despite a shift from nineteenth-century Vienna to present-day New York, she has left the bones of the original story largely intact. This portrait of wannabe bohemians and intellectuals who adopt the fashions, mannerisms, and artistic practices of an earlier time has its own essential timelessness.

As in the novella, the society has a lone female member in its ranks, an actress and singer named Gloria (Greta Lee, of the romantic drama “Past Lives”). A woman of flamboyantly seductive gestures, Gloria dazzles Saxberger with her puckish wit, come-hither smile, and unfeigned, vibrant talent—at one point, she delivers a fiery rendition of the 1929 Brecht-Weill standard “Surabaya Johnny”—only to stand revealed, in the final stretch, as a tragically elusive object of desire. But hers is not the only mask to come off. Jones, who wrote and directed the realist drama “Diane” (2019), has made a satire with a surfeit of soul; he turns even the revelation of his characters’ foibles and pretensions into an act of tenderness. Meyers turns out to be a rich kid with a fancy apartment, someone who can afford to play the artistic revolutionary—which doesn’t negate, and may indeed validate, his love for art.

The only figure who remains transparently, unchangeably himself is Saxberger, who, even as he enjoys his brush with literary celebrity, finds a deeper liberation in his limitations. He cannot churn out fresh verse on someone else’s deadline; nor can he pretend to be the critical authority, the endlessly encouraging mentor and sounding board, that his society friends so desperately need him to be. The poetry of this movie, in short, is in Dafoe, who gives his finest performance in years—a long trek from bliss to despair to disillusionment, and finally to the odd contentment and consolation that disillusionment often brings. ♦