BEFORE he was Anthony Bourdain, he was Tony: Nu Metro’s FOMO – First On Movie Openings – series gives audiences in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town an early seat at A24’s acclaimed coming-of-age drama on 8 October.
Long before the bestselling books, the television shows and a passport crowded with stamps, Anthony Bourdain was a 19-year-old college student with more nerve than direction. Tony, the new film from director Matt Johnson, goes back to the summer of 1975, when a young Bourdain followed a girl to Provincetown, Massachusetts, took a job washing dishes in a seafood restaurant and found – in the heat, noise and chaos of a professional kitchen – the life he would spend the rest of his years chasing.
On Thursday, 8 October at 7.30pm, Nu Metro will host FOMO screenings of Tony at Hyde Park, Menlyn, Gateway and Cavendish, ahead of the film’s local opening on 9 October. Each ticket includes a VIP cinema seat, popcorn and a soda – the kind of evening best shared with a few friends and a long conversation afterwards.
Dominic Sessa, who made his name opposite Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers, plays the young Bourdain, with Antonio Banderas as the restaurant’s chef and owner who becomes an unlikely mentor. Emilia Jones (CODA), Leo Woodall, Dagmara Domińczyk, Rich Sommer and Stavros Halkias round out the cast. Johnson, the Canadian filmmaker behind BlackBerry, co-wrote the screenplay, and Jay McCarrol composed the score.
The film has been warmly received since its US release in August. It currently holds a 93% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus describes it as “a splendid tribute to mentorship” and singles out Banderas’s performance. It was also named a New York Times Critic’s Pick, while the Wall Street Journal called it “the most exhilarating experience I’ve had at the movies this year.”
For anyone who came to know Bourdain through Kitchen Confidential or Parts Unknown, the film offers a glimpse of where the appetite, the restlessness and the refusal to do anything by halves first took root. For everyone else, it stands on its own as a funny, tender story about a young man figuring out who he is, one shift at a time.
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