During the waning days of the press tour for The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan gave a surprisingly in-depth and frank interview with Chinese podcast host Zhong Shu. As part of the discussion, Nolan expressed one of his annoyances with modern film criticism: the tendency to gamify the experience of watching a film. Many audiences have an insecure need to be one step ahead of the story, as if knowing what's going to happen before it happens is the mark of an intelligent viewer. And if we're smarter than the movie, then it means the movie isn't pulling off its trick of illusion. "Because to be able to identify the mechanism does not invalidate the mechanism...” he said. "Because people have this idea that, ‘Because I can understand why the story affects me the way it is, therefore, it didn’t work."

Apart from maybe superhero films, Nolan's grievance finds its greatest home in the biopic genre. Whether it’s the fact that they're (somewhat) based on true stories with rigid parameters for what can and can't happen, or that it’s simply what sells lots of tickets, biopics have some of the most recurring and recognizable traits in all of cinema. Throughout my time as a film critic, I've written ad nauseam about films like I Wanna Dance with Somebody, Back to Black, Bob Marley: One Love, and Bohemian Rhapsody. Just as they all presented the same cadence of trials and tribulations for their central figures, I wrote the same critique of having to sit through the formula again and again. Perhaps my fixation on the routine story beats prevented me from digging deeper into the juicier thematic material.

Of course, like Nolan's view, my critique of those subpar films was not solely based on the innate fact that they followed the formula. Plenty of great biopics followed the Rosetta Stone to the letter just as much, such as A Complete Unknown, The Aviator, and Nolan's own Best Picture-winning Oppenheimer. What creates a feast out of a famine is the combination of all facets of the production. Bob Marley: One Love and A Complete Unknown both feature transformative performances (Kingsley Ben-Adir and Timothée Chalamet, respectively) at the center of their conventional stories, but only the latter featured the craft and unspoken warmth that kept me fully invested.

All in all, this brings us to Tony, the origin story of Anthony Bourdain (going by “Tony” here) before he became the bad boy of the culinary world with his Kitchen Confidential book and travelogue shows. Granted, he was always a bad boy, as evidenced by the opening quote (also prominently featured on the film’s poster): “I was – to be frank – a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout.” In his eyes, his roguish charm comes from his cool wordplay, with lies spun with such a bragging nature that he wholly believes everyone hangs onto his every word like it is gospel. It’s why he’s telling everyone he’s going to get a summer writing fellowship grant from Vassar only a few minutes after coming out of the interview.

It’s not much of a coincidence that the two people who see right through him are women: his stern mother Gladys (Dagmara Domińczyk) and Nancy (Emilia Jones), an older classmate he has a crush on. Unfortunately, the script by director Matt Johnson, as well as Todd Bartels, Lou Howe, and Matthew Miller, does not support these women as anything beyond functions for Tony to become Anthony Bourdain. They are uninterested in him when he needs to be at his lowest, and then interested in him once the story requires it.

The double whammy of their initial disinterest is what sets Tony on his course of self-discovery. Inevitably, he doesn’t get the writing fellowship. Instead of admitting this fact to his parents and friends, he steals all the cash from his dad’s wallet and hops on a bus. His destination is the seaside Provincetown, where he’ll repair his broken ego by wooing Nancy at her summer job. On his first night in town, he’s thrown out of a restaurant for drunkenness, losing all his cash and bumming on the street. The restaurant’s owner and head chef (Antonio Banderas), who simply goes by “Chef,” takes pity on Tony, giving him a dishwasher job in exchange for the couple of bucks he needs to get back home.

In the kitchen, Tony meets the salt and brine of the working class, filled with cursing, inappropriate jokes about coworkers' mothers, and the high stakes of surviving a lunch rush during the height of tourist season. It’s put up or shut up, with Tony unable to talk his way out of his inadequacy. As he did a few years ago with BlackBerry, Johnson has crafted an ode to outcasts, those who sweat over a hot stove all day, then throw away their apron to sit around a fire on the beach while throwing back a few (too many) beers. There’s a rambunctious rhythm to the chaos of the kitchen, the staff’s mismatched personalities merging into a found family.

It’s admirable that Johnson focused most of his efforts on that aspect, because the biopic-y nature of this story is rather shallow, overrelying on our already established understanding of Bourdain. His ignition for cooking is rather absent here, with only a small handful of scenes featuring meals being served. For a movie about a chef, there was not a moment when my mouth watered, nor did I feel very educated about how a master chef starts his journey.

What I did feel connected to was Dominic Sessa’s lead performance, a natural extension of his revelatory debut work in The Holdovers a few years back. It’s his time to come of age, to figure out the person he truly is instead of the person he keeps telling everyone (and himself) who he will be. Banderas is also quite incredible in a role that could have used just a little more padding. He’s found his oasis in the desert, secure enough in his dreams and ambitions to extend a helping hand to Tony, whose greatest life lesson was getting punched in the face as he was thrown on that first night.

Even when you think you can’t eat anymore, a great chef will bring something out that makes your stomach find a new level of appetite. Even with a talent like Johnson, Tony didn’t do that for me, more or less just being another stage in the endless course meal that is the biopic genre. It’s appetizing to look at and has a smooth flavor, but little nutritional value.

A24 will release Tony in select theaters on August 07th, followed by a nationwide expansion on August 21st.