Review: In 'Tony,' a surly, snobby teenaged Anthony Bourdain learns the recipe for becoming a man

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Set us as preferred Bravado, insecurity, deceit.These are the bitter ingredients that seasoned the chef Anthony Bourdain inside the pressure cooker of the restaurant industry.

Set over one formative summer in 1975, Matt Johnson’s affectionately sleazy biopic “Tony” is a portrait of the culinary adventurer (who died by suicide in 2018 at the age of 61) as a snotty 19-year-old Vassar student who doesn’t know an oyster knife from his ego.“I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” Bourdain confessed in his 2000 bestseller “Kitchen Confidential,” a scorching memoir that elevated him from obscurity to damaged saint.

“Tony” opens with that quote and proves it with scenes of boozing, puking and petty crime.Miraculously, it’s the most heartwarming comedy of the year.Teenage Tony (a feral Dominic Sessa of “The Holdovers”) claims he’s already writing the next great American book, a navel-gazing bildungsroman — his word, not mine — in the key of Kerouac.

Really, he’s just a middle-class kid from New Jersey who doesn’t expect to work for a living.Stalking his high school crush Nancy (a grounded Emilia Jones) to Provincetown, Mass., he begrudgingly supports himself with a dishwashing gig at the Flagship, a humble seafood joint.

The kid is ashamed of blue-collar labor.That his rowdy co-workers think he sucks at it is worse.

This taste of humiliation would change his destiny.Under the tutelage of the Flagship’s idiosyncratic unnamed chef (Antonio Banderas), Tony will discover the importance of punctuality.

A devilish shellfish-shucker (Leo Woodall, an intoxicating scamp) will also introduce him to cocaine.That first bump hits Tony with such a rush that the soundtrack explodes with boogielicious dis...