Tony review: Late Anthony Bourdain is turned into a coming-of-age movie hero

Running time: 106 minutes.<em> </em>Rated R (pervasive language, drug use, and sexual content/nudity).In theaters Aug.

7.I can’t say I had “No Reservations” when it was announced that an Anthony Bourdain biopic was in the works.I had plenty.How could any movie about the bad-boy chef, author and TV star escape the dark cloud of his shocking 2018 death by suicide? Or would stopping the story before that horrible day do the complicated subject, who was just as uncompromised and probing on his travel shows as any journalist, a disservice? A no-win situation, you’d think.Yet supremely likable “Tony” mostly solves the problem by focusing as tightly as possible on his first formative summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as an overconfident 19-year-old rebel without a cassoulet.

And that memorable experience, which introduced him to the intoxicating world of kitchens and food, becomes a textbook coming-of-age film.Really, if a viewer doesn’t know Bourdain from Pepin, “Tony” would play as a highly entertaining, heart-tugging and fictional boy-to-man vacation flick, like “The Way Way Back.” For the food celeb’s fans, the movie still mostly does, even if, like coming across an old photograph from a breezier time, there is the unavoidable occasional pang of sadness.Bourdain once wrote of his early turning point, the summer of 1973, in a Salon essay. “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” he said.That ruthlessly reflective quote also acts as “Tony”’s logline.In giving Bourdain the Hollywood treatment, director and co-writer Matt Johnston seizes that diagnosis and segments of his memoir “Kitchen Confidential” while playing fast and loose with specific facts.And that’s fine.

The film has no illusions of being Tonypedia. So, in this almost mythic telling he heads to Cape Cod on the winds of a lie.Tony (Dominic Sessa)...