Director: Matt Johnson
Cast: Dominic Sessa, Emilia Jones, Stavros Halkias, Antonio Banderas
Have I Seen It Before: Never.
Did I Like It: A biopic is mostly going to depend on your view of the subject. If you never thought Andy Kaufman was funny in life, then Man on the Moon (1999) isn’t going to work for you. If you never got any joy out of b movies, you will confront Ed Wood (1994) with a certain amount of, “who cares?” If you think pornography is the knifes edge of the decline of Western Civilization (and view the decline of Western Civilization as a bad thing), then I’m not sure what you’re doing here, but I’m also fairly sure that The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) is the film for you*.
Here, things are a little different. You might not be what might reductively be called a “foodie” (if you’ve ordered Fries from a speaker in the last 24 hours, like I have, you may not qualify), and so Anthony Bourdain (Sessa) may not mean much to you. Alternatively, you might be so consciously aware of the food you take in that you might make an ethical choice to be a vegetarian. Bourdain wasn’t terribly fond of that, either, although the reasons are a little more complicated than I am painting them
In short, no matter how you might view food, you may have had occasion to view Bourdain as a jerk. And as played by Sessa in this film, he is a jerk. He’s 19, so that might be a given. But you kind of like the kid, even as he does horrible things to the people around him and only haltingly finds himself. Antonio Banderas as his unnamed culinary Jiminy Cricket is providing what might yet be a career-best performance. The supporting cast is delightful, even when they are being terrible.
In short, the movie transcends its subject matter, along with the constraints of a biopic, and becomes a vital, believable coming-of-age story. The greatest praise I can heap upon it? I actually want to read Kitchen Confidential, and hear more from Bourdain after watching it.
*Not for nothing that all three of those films share production crew, and indeed some share identical credits.