Yet the Bourdain cult remains surprisingly durable on the basis of the new biopic Tony, the makers of which so revere their subject that they assume that an audience will care about the formative years of the chef. (Or should I say, the formative years of “Chef”?) So we are treated to the life and times of a callow, clumsy, crude, cliché-spewing aspirant writer-turned-cook. Despite the fact that Bourdain acknowledged that he was, during the time period depicted in the movie, a “thoughtless young lout” who was “badly in need of a good a**-kicking,” he nonetheless exhibited the same qualities throughout his life. (The line is quoted on-screen before the movie starts.) This makes Tony not a coming-of-age story as much as an attempted deification.

Gone are the days when biopics attended to the early lives of genuine heroes, such as Richard Attenborough’s film about Churchill, Young Winston (1972). That being said, Tony bears some family resemblance to “Great Man” biopics on the order of Young Winston: Both take their subjects’ virtuousness for granted. But there is a crucial (and telling) difference: One movie is about a leading figure in Western Civilization, the other is about a man whose claims to fame include proving what stern stuff he was made of by eating singularly gross dishes on TV. Tony is like Young Winston only in its approach, not in the worthiness of that approach.

From the first frames of Tony, the audience is encouraged to identify with and, in fact, adore this unkempt antihero. When Bourdain (played by Dominic Sessa), a Vassar College student in 1975, describes a dubious-sounding writing project while applying for a literary fellowship (a truly awful-sounding mashup of George Orwell and Jack Kerouac), we are meant to love him. When he reveals that he was not serious about that writing project — that he merely wanted to get a hold of the fellowship money to write something else — we are meant to love him even more. In the normal course of things, when the protagonist of a book or movie abuses alcohol, has a pronounced inability to be roused from sleep, and is said to have punched a hole in his high school principal’s office door, we might consider that protagonist to be, at minimum, flawed. In the case of Tony, however, these facts are intended to (but, to the discerning viewer, most certainly do not) amplify his coolness.

Director and co-writer Matt Johnson — one of an astonishing four writers here credited — has zero interest in presenting a counterargument that Bourdain was, in fact, an ungovernable vulgarian. When his mother (Dagmara Dominczyk) sensibly quizzes him about that Vassar fellowship, she is presented as a harridan. When she corrects his mispronunciation of the term “Bildungsroman,” she is supposed to come across pretty much as evil. The movie is ever on Tony’s side. That fellow student Nancy (Emilia Jones) — a character meant to be Bourdain’s future wife, in real life — considers him anything more than a sniveling, affected loser, at least at this point, calls into question her basic intelligence. That the transparently fictionalized Tony is inspired by real people and actual events does not let it off the hook for failing to persuade on its own terms.   

Equally inexplicable is the faith placed in Bourdain by Antonio Banderas’s character Chef — yes, as if chosen to annoy me, that’s his name. He’s the chef-proprietor of a seafood restaurant in Provincetown who whispers wisdom to Bourdain from behind an imposing beard and equally imposing chef’s jacket (the latter of which, in the movie’s universe, is akin to priestly vestments). The film presents Chef as a dictatorial presence who insists on timeliness (and church attendance) from his new employee, but this does not square with the unrelentingly rude atmosphere in his kitchen, where expletives are exchanged freely and drugs taken openly. Again, Johnson delights in this flagrantly naughty scene. Tony has clearly found his ideal habitation, though he displays few skills that would plausibly endear him to Chef. He cannot even operate the device that extracts French fries from whole potatoes.

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Yet the makers of the movie are banking on the audience wishing to simply spend time in the company of Bourdain, even in this lowly state, since his future fortune and glory are implicit in every scene. We know he will live up to Chef’s unlikely confidence in him. We know his mother’s doubts will be vanquished. Notwithstanding its indulgence of Bourdain’s slobbish behavior, the movie is incredibly mawkish, including an extended sequence in which Nancy photographs her beau for a future book jacket picture and a hilariously repetitive score that is cued each time something important happens. This is a movie in which the following line is uttered straight-faced: “You know, you can be anything you want to be.” Of course, there are many obligatory shots of allegedly gourmet food, including the Lobster Thermidor that Bourdain, rather unbelievably, given the way in which he is presented here, manages to prepare.

The movie takes us no further than Bourdain’s admission to the Culinary Institute of America. At least it is merciful in its brevity.

Peter Tonguette is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.