Biopics face a serious and often unresolvable contradiction. Their audience is built upon name recognition, but the eternal cultural currency of celebrity is mitigated by a passé genre with a reputation for lazy, exploitative, and inert works. It’s no small thing to film the story of a leader, activist, or artist with a large following (and thus a large likelihood of backlash), especially if they died prematurely and tragically. Tony—the first fiction film about beloved chef memoirist and food traveloguer Anthony Bourdain—belongs instead to a niche, less flashy subgenre of biopic: the “formative years” biopic.
These focus on the artist (or chef) as a young man (they’re nearly always men) as a mound of unsculpted clay, ignorant of what lies ahead. They tackle the grand scope of the biopic from a low-key vantage point, imbuing small wins and life lessons with prophetic significance. It’s one of the only types of star-subject biopic to do on a low budget—no need for star power, as the subject is the star; likewise, the early timeline rules out staging the concerts, kitchens, and other splashy set pieces of their career peak. There’s a lot of power to be found in implication, and these small-scale biopics rely on the audience’s awareness of their future exploits and troubles to read the mundane plots as richly symbolic.
Inspired by an early section in Bourdain’s breakout bestseller Kitchen Confidential, Tony consciously rejects any propulsive race through its subject’s riotous cooking career, memoirs, and travel shows by focusing on his first major step towards culinary celebrity—a summer spent in Provincetown, Massachusetts where Tony (Dominic Sessa) shucked oysters, chased his dreamgirl Nancy (Emilia Jones), and was generally a pain in the ass. Rocking a mop of curls and a fragile swagger, Tony gets his act forcibly cleaned up by the strict but wise chef (Antonio Banderas) who gives him a job washing dishes.
These kinds of formative biopics take what might be the first act—or first 15 minutes—of a traditional biopic and draw it out, probing relationships for psychological resonance with one eye firmly fixed on the future. These are films like Nowhere Boy (about teenage John Lennon), Stardust (about pre-Ziggy David Bowie), or My Friend Dahmer (which inverts the biopic’s usual fawning tone for a leering, sinister look at Jeffrey Dahmer’s senior year). These films are driven by dramatic irony, where the audience knows why we’re here even if the protagonist doesn’t.
When Tony balks at the vulgar obscenities cooks hurl across the kitchen, we know how much Bourdain would venerate this in-the-trenches vernacular later in life. When John (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is repeatedly hounded by his aunt and guardian Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas) to wear his uncool round spectacles in Nowhere Boy, we know that Lennon would be forever associated with the eyewear.
Tony does not argue that Anthony Bourdain did anything significant that summer in Provincetown (it was actually a couple summers, and nearly all of Tony‘s supporting characters are composites of the P-town chefs, line cooks, and dangerous personalities from Kitchen Confidential‘s adolescence chapters), but he sure learned a lot. We know the legends, the formative biopic says, but was there some intense relationship or change that affected the subject in those obscure early days that we haven’t considered? For Tony, it’s his gruff, well-traveled chef mentor and first delusional, head-over-heels infatuation; for John, it was his free-spirited mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) who pops back up in his life to fuel his hunger for music, style, and lust. (Turns out John Lennon has some Oedipal issues.)
This narrative gambit takes it for granted that the biopic subject has become too culturally mythicized to approach at their peak, so instead they are brought down to Earth and humanized by looking as ordinary as possible. Before he was Bourdain, he was Tony; before he was John Lennon, he was just a Nowhere Boy; and if we invert fame to infamy, before he was America’s worst serial killer, he was just My Friend Dahmer.
This through-line, about how deconstructing the myth made the subject come much more sharply into focus, is so prominent in the subgenre that it bleeds into promotional interviews. Both Johnson and Sessa wanted to evoke a moment where Bourdain was “still inventing himself.” According to Sam Taylor-Johnson, “There’s enough that’s going on in the part of [Lennon’s] life that we focus on to sort of tell you everything about the rest of his life as well.” Harry Lawtey, who played Richard Burton before he pursued an acting career in Mr. Burton, explained Burton’s infamous alcoholism with, “There’s a very confused kind of trauma in Richard that led to his drinking.” In the woeful Stardust, where Bowie struggled through a humiliating 1971 American tour, Johnny Flynn argued that this directly led to the singer’s most iconic era: “David needed to make Ziggy to save himself from himself.”
They’re not like other biopics. They’re realer and more human, washed clean of corny pastiche that can’t live up to the real thing. This is the ethos—and the promotional hook—of the “formative years” biopic, even if these attempts to demythologize their subjects end up resembling the regular, commercial biopics they assure us they’re subverting. Yet, if anything, the legend is left immaculate and uncontested, supported by a coming-of-age arc that acts as a transition from “ordinary” to “legendary.”
There is no shortage of blunt and self-satisfied beats that zero in on the first-time experiences of something viewers know will be major. Tony shucking his first oyster or taking his first noseful of cocaine, or riling up a cook with insults for the first time. Nowhere Boy lingers on a sign for the “Strawberry Field” children’s home and Lennon’s classroom doodle of a walrus, but these are trivial compared to new bandmate Paul McCartney (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) who draws our focus from John’s two maternal influences and back to the one thing Nowhere Boy is not supposed to be about: the enormous shadow of The Beatles.
When Tony complains about the loneliness of a writer’s life, or watches Sal (Leo Woodall) take heroin on a beach, or learns the story of chef who died by suicide—clues of destructive tendencies and foundational relationships that imply the version of the subject that the audience is already familiar with—it generates a weird sense of destiny. It charges these subjects’ early swipes at selfhood and success, as well as their eventual tragic deaths, with an aura of foreboding but mysterious certainty.
This is textbook mythologizing, which becomes more sinister when the biopic blurs into true-crime. In My Friend Dahmer, Jeffrey Dahmer (Ross Lynch) is shot with an intentional, overbearing quietness, interrupted with lingering glimpses of his perverse fascination with anatomy and decomposition, his aggressive social defects, and his obsession with voyeurism and violation. The film claims an empathetic angle by showing how his upbringing itself lacked empathy, but in promoting the film, director Marc Meyers hinted at a darker exploitative edge to his “formative years” biopic, saying he wanted to create “a ticking time bomb,” that would have the audience asking “when it’s going to snap or turn.”
Leering and fawning are opposite sides of the same coin, and the eagerness of these formative biopics to tee up what we already know doesn’t just accept the legend of a cultural figure, but evades engaging with it. In stripping away the fame and importance from a character’s story, these films are left with a weird, distracting smugness; Tony and Nowhere Boy get such a kick about turning an icon into just a scrappy kid living an anonymous life that could theoretically happen to anyone, ignoring the fact that without the assured future of celebrity (overtly called ahead to), the intentionally generic nature of their stories would have even less dramatic merit.
Then, when the film ends, everything the audience knows about the famous subject can begin—Tony ends with Bourdain taking his culinary school interview and introducing himself as “Anthony Bourdain,” implying that these raw ingredients are now a completed dish. Rather than ending with the sense of a proper beginning, the formative years biopic gives a sense of order and convention to a crucially disordered moment in a figure’s life. (Kitchen Confidential readers know that Bourdain’s subsequent New York cooking career was not exactly disciplined.) Nothing in these films would be out of place in the trite conventional biopics the filmmakers distance themselves from, but because a recurring fault in biopics is a ruthless choppy pace that rushes us through vignetted fragments of a whole life, the fact that the subgenre stays rooted in a single biographical chapter is claimed as transformative. Tony is just the latest in a run of biopics that play down their famous subject matter as much as they can get away with, asking us to share their delight that someone so remarkable could ever have been this plain—but don’t worry, that plainness will end as soon as the movie does.
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