Meet Anthony Bourdain Before He Became a God

The new movie "Tony" gets right what every other biopic does wrong. But Anthony Bourdain superfans should brace themselves.

Courtesy of A24

My curmudgeonly pop-culture take is that we’ve had enough of the biopics.

I don’t need to see another actor lip-sync to a musician’s songs, perfectly mimic some iconic speech, render themselves “unrecognizable” in laughable prosthetics, or affect an insufferable way of speaking that they carry on using long after filming wraps.

The whole enterprise has been exhausted. Attracting audiences to theaters over the excitement of seeing so-and-so play who’s-a-what’s-it is as lazy a gambit as yet another franchise reboot or sequel.

It’s from the cloudy swamp of this grumpiness over biopics that my appreciation for Tony, the new movie about a young Anthony Bourdain, miraculously grows.

Tony, which hits select theaters Aug. 7, takes a nimble detour around the imposing fortress protecting what I’ll refer to as “the Anthony Bourdain of it all” ever since the food icon’s death in 2018.

Skirting the pretention of legacy and the Bourdain industrial complex of the last eight years, the film is instead a slight yet affecting coming-of-age story of the twerpy kid decades before anyone knew or exalted the myth, the hero, the legend; it’s Tony before he became Anthony.