By Dexter "Box-Office" Reel
Dominic Sessa keeps ending up in the 1970s, and he's not complaining.
The 23-year-old actor, who broke out playing surly prep-schooler Angus Tully in Alexander Payne's Oscar-winning The Holdovers, now stars as a 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain in the new film Tony, according to an interview with The Guardian. The movie, restricted to one summer in 1975, follows the future Kitchen Confidential author as he drifts through the seaside resort of Provincetown, Massachusetts — falling in love, scrubbing pans in a seafood restaurant and, in Bourdain's own words quoted in the piece, finding what "for a rootless young man with sensualist inclinations... was the perfect getaway."
Sessa tells The Guardian that kitchen life on screen, and off, ran hot: "These cooks ripped each other apart," he says of the environment the film re-creates, one defined by bullying, pressure and camaraderie in equal measure — the same crucible Bourdain would later chronicle in his bestselling memoir and its TV spin-off.
It's the second film in Sessa's five-picture career steeped in 1970s texture; The Holdovers didn't just take place in 1970, the Guardian piece notes, it was shot to look and feel like it had been made then. Sessa, born and raised in New Jersey decades after the era he keeps inhabiting, says part of him would happily stay there.
Tony does not yet have a wide theatrical release date confirmed in available reporting.
Dexter's take: Sessa has range, and Bourdain's restless hunger is a natural fit for an actor who clearly likes sitting in period detail rather than skating past it. Cautiously intrigued — the proof is in the pans.
Loved it, hated it, or wasted my afternoon — here's which.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
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