Thanks to the wild success of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie earlier this year, audiences should be a little less surprised by Matt Johnson’s slippery relationship to reality, rules, and expectations. Blackberry, a funny and riveting telling of the rise and downfall of the creators of the proto-smartphone that played seriously fast and loose with the facts, also should’ve provided a heads-up.

Audiences loved it, no doubt oblivious to its mile-long list of inaccuracies. The tech gurus at the film’s center, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, were never exactly household names. Time has only made that more the case. If Johnson had to capture the life of a far more well-known person, though, would audiences be as forgiving? Would the film be as artistically successful?

Tony is about to answer that question by bringing the early years of Anthony Bourdain to the silver screen. Unlike Lazaridis and Balsillie, Bourdain has a true cult following. His devotees include wannabe bad boy chefs, travelers, writers, and girls who ran out of Lonely Planet travel videos to borrow from the library. Ok, that last one might just be me. Kitchen Confidential is more than a bestseller. It’s an essential millennial text. Its dog-eared pages sit next to unread copies of Infinite Jest on apartment bookshelves across the land.

After his memoir and time as executive chef at Les Halles put him on the map, the Travel Channel show No Reservations cemented his status as an icon. It combined his love of food and sharp wit with self-scripted, deeply personal, and often poetic narration. With all that context and easily accessible quotes and clips, surely Johnson wouldn’t stray too far from the truth. Would he?

But if the man who skyrocketed to fame for (illegally) skydiving off the top of the CN Tower knows anything, it’s that rules are for chumps. Tony pulls primarily from only the first two chapters of Kitchen Confidential. Even then, it mostly takes the broadest of strokes, condensing a few years of Bourdain’s life into a single summer. 

After losing out on a writing fellowship at Vassar, Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) decides to run off to Cape Cod. Post-punching a hole in his wall, of course. There, he plans to let everyone think he got the fellowship, steal time with his crush, avoid his parents, and drink himself properly into oblivion. In short order, he’s found passed out in the street by the chef of a local seafood spot (Antonio Banderas). The restaurant owner takes pity on him, giving Bourdain a place to crash forh the summer in exchange for helping out as a dishwasher.

Sessa’s interpretation of 19-year-old Tony (don’t call him Anthony, he repeatedly reminds us) is a lumbering black-clad beast. Hunched, he drags himself through the summery streets of Provincetown like some punk-emo Dracula. He has no idea what he wants other than respect he hasn’t earned and the attention of a pretty girl. The only thing he does seem sure of is how much he hates himself.

By creating this version, Sessa proves his mettle as one of our more interesting and exciting young actors. At 23, he’s already an expert at maintaining a sense of vulnerability, no matter how unlikeable the character. He plays off Banderas beautifully, rebelling against his rules while clearly grateful for their structure.

As Chef, Banderas is an amalgamation of Bourdain’s real-life culinary mentors. That’s probably why his title doubles as his name. Even without a proper name, Banderas does more than just play the wise father-figure to a kid in need. He has a way of letting the man’s own heart shine through, revealing a man who still has dreams. He believes in second chances even as he carries profound grief for a long-departed community.

All together, Tony is a sparkling coming-of-age story about what happens when your ambitions, desires, and failings come crashing together at once. It also makes the film an almost hysterically inaccurate portrayal of Bourdain’s real life. In reality, Anthony never missed out on a Vassar writing fellowship because he was never up for one. He had far more respect for kitchens and chefs from minute one. But those changes serve the exploration of a question central to both Tony and the real Anthony: who do you want to be?

It’s perhaps the only real question at the heart of any story about growth. Everyone eventually hits a wall where they have to decide if their track is the one they want to be on or just the one they can’t get off. After the self-destructive tendencies, selfishness, and self-loathing, the question remains. It is the film’s way of asking Sessa’s Tony to reckon with the true effects of his decisions. Both he and the real Bourdain can only ignore, run from, and drown it in substances for so long. Together with co-writers Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels, and Lou Howe, Johnson captures an Anthony Bourdain that doesn’t require you to know or even care who he was. What they present instead is a boy trying to figure out some way to be the kind of man he might actually like.

We’ll never know what Bourdain might have thought about this adaptation of his life, but I like to think it would be closer to Balsillie’s reaction to Blackberry. He happily called Glenn Howerton’s portrayal of himself “brilliant” while in the same breath confirming that it’s only about 5% reality. But what is unabashedly real about Tony is how carefully and thoughtfully it explores some of the most important themes and things in Bourdain’s life: food, people, and the world we live in.

Tony has a friends and family opening in select theatres August 7 before the Grand Opening in theatres everywhere August 21.

Tony Trailer: