Tony

A24’s Anthony Bourdain biopic dropped its first trailer last week, and we at Trailaurality are absolutely seated. Dominic Sessa stars as a young Bourdain in 1976 Provincetown—years before culinary school, and decades before Kitchen Confidential.

Antonio Banderas plays a Brazilian-born restaurateur who takes the young Tony under his wing. Matt Johnson (Operation Avalanche, Blackberry) directs. Notably, Bourdain made his shows about music as much as food; Parts Unknown episodes routinely opened with Iggy Pop, Television, Queens of the Stone Age, and Mark Lanegan, among others. A biopic about him before he became Anthony Bourdain has a choice to make: does the trailer focus on period-appropriate music (e.g. around the Ramones' debut, Patti Smith's “Horses”—or does it gesture toward the catalog he'd later canonize on TV? And, whose Bourdain is this? The one we typically recall—leather jacket, and all—or a Bourdain before that persona existed, when he was just a kid in a beach town kitchen with surely no idea what he'd become?

The trailer lands the first answer at 0:28, with Television’s “See No Evil” (1977). Note the immaculately timed F-bomb synched to the downbeat at 0:29. We see Bourdain stumble into kitchen life after being rejected for a writing fellowship—a petulant, even resentful Bourdain, clearly miffed at his rejection—still identifying as a writer as he works under a strict chef and with unserious colleagues. An action montage ends at 1:02 with another clear synch point—the last note of the tune lines up perfectly with Bourdain receiving a swift punch to the face.

At 1:06 things take a turn with a pointed question to Tony: “Are you a good guy or a bad guy?” Spoon’s “Wild” enters here, a 2022 track—and not coincidentally, we see an entirely different side of Bourdain here, who says of oysters “I ate these in France when I was a kid—I said they taste like the future”. The cinematography and action are markedly different, as well, with soft close-ups opening the oysters, and more intimate scenes accompany Spoon’s dreamy soundscape: “I was reminded / every measure / I got on fine with modern living.” Thus the music comments as we see Tony come around to seeing and respecting his boss—“this guy, he’s like a master chef,” he slowly says. He later notes “if everyone asks, I’m not a writer… I work in a kitchen”. A little bit of trailerization in the soundtrack at 2:12 (added percussion, mainly) is merited as a lead-up to Tony stating his name in full as the obligatory turn phrase at the end—and you can sense him coming into his own, as the Anthony Bourdain the world has come to know.

So, the music supervision choices to split evenly and keenly down the middle—the first half shows us Tony as a petulant youth, with a contemporaneous soundtrack that fits raucous, earlier times; the back half promises growth, transformation, and brings us back towards the present with a new song, released in fact four years after Bourdain’s tragic passing.

Tony lands in theatres this August.

— Curtis Perry