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Anthony Bourdain Was a Jerk Before He Was a God

The new movie “Tony” reveals what 19-year-old Bourdain was like as he gets his first-ever restaurant job.

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.

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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.

It’s the kind of film that could elicit a “wait, that was it?” reaction from Bourdain enthusiasts who may have been craving the full buffet of the writer and documentarian’s life to feast on, a version of the bloated, calorie-less biopics that have been served up relentlessly over the last few years.

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Kevin FallonEditor-at-Large, Obsessed

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