There’s a reason that the new movie Tony isn’t called Kitchen Confidential, even though the title would fit. That bestselling 2000 book by Anthony Bourdain, part memoir and part casual exposé, related the chef’s personal experiences in the restaurant industry and brought him enough fame to jump-start his television career. While Bourdain became the host of food-focused travel shows, the book itself was loosely adapted into a short-lived TV comedy, also called Kitchen Confidential. Though the book has remained popular, hitting the charts again in 2018 following Bourdain’s death, between the fictional show and the many nonfiction series Bourdain was a part of, as well as a biographical documentary from 2022, the material seems pretty well tapped out.

That’s where Tony comes in.

The new A24 movie is also fiction, but it’s more personal than the Kitchen Confidential series (which had a pre-stardom Bradley Cooper as “Jack Bourdain”), adapting the first two chapters of the book into a coming-of-age story about college student and malcontent Tony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa, graduating from the prep school of The Holdovers), an aspiring writer whose ambitions seem to outstrip his abilities. Following a cocky pitch to a fellowship committee about the heady novel he plans to write, he’s devastated to learn that his project hasn’t been selected for funding. In a stubborn fit of pique, he lights out for Provincetown, Massachusetts, entirely because Nancy (Emilia Jones), a girl he has attempted to impress with stories of his burgeoning writing career, will be spending the summer there. Flailing (and lying!) with drunken hostility through a town where he half-knows a couple of girls, he winds up getting a kitchen job at a seafood shack run by a talented but underrecognized chef (Antonio Banderas), his introduction to kitchen culture.

The Banderas character isn’t from any one figure in the book; the movie takes incidents and anecdotes from those early chapters and sorts them into a more conventional single-summer narrative arc, taking place over the course of a few months in 1975. In that sense, the movie’s adherence to Bourdain’s “real” life is pretty biographically loose. What director Matt Johnson (who previously made the true-life-based Blackberry, as well as serving as one half of the duo behind Nirvanna the Band the Show and its recent film version) attempts to capture is the overall feel of Bourdain’s experiences — the feckless youth he started as, and the change he underwent as a result of his Cape Cod summer.

In other words, Johnson has made a pretty conventional coming-of-age movie from the biographical outlines of one of the most famous culinary names of the 21st century. Sometimes its lead’s destiny still manages to nudge mere characters out the way; that’s especially true of Nancy, who the movie is forced to admit does not figure into Tony’s future. On its own, their eventual parting is a nicely bittersweet touch. In the full context of the movie, it’s both a little aggrandizing to Tony and a little unfair to Jones, who has to give a convincing performance as someone who sees the good in her surly sorta-stalker, only to be treated as disposable to a larger narrative at hand.

Mostly, though, Tony works on its chosen terms: fleet, entertaining, frequently funny, with a boldly unlikable yet somehow empathetic performance from Sessa at the center. The tendency in most biographical movies about well-liked figures, even ones that are largely made up, is to send out signals about the subject’s nascent genius or specialness. Tony rather brilliantly declines most of these opportunities. Tony’s writerly affectations — his tendency to throw around big words, his half-assed brainstorming, his lack of actual time spent sitting down and putting pen to paper — are, if anything, signs that he’s ages away from growing into his ambition.

Yet the movie also doesn’t do much to hint that his writing talent is about to be eclipsed by innately brilliant cooking, either. He’s drawn into the restaurant world by guys like Sal (Leo Woodall) or Dimitri (Stavros Halkias), who use the fast-paced, night-heavy kitchen work as an excuse to do drugs and chase women. As with writing, Tony seems intoxicated by the actual worst elements of the work he comes to revere. (Maybe it’s his myopia that allows the movie to pay on the merest of lip service to Provincetown’s history as a haven for gay people; at least, that’s the only plausible excuse I could think of for how little reference there is to it here, even in passing.)

The movie does such a good job of making the audience see Bourdain as unformed, relatably bumbling Tony, in fact, that when the screenplay feeds Sessa a line from Bourdain’s memoir about raw oysters tasting like the future, it lands with a thud. On the other side, it should be easy to pick Banderas out as the composited invention: the slightly gruff, but secretly kind, chef presiding over a ramshackle but high-quality little kitchen, reawakening his passion for fancier dishes at Tony’s urging, serving as an “unexpected” (which is to say completely obvious) mentor. Yet Banderas anchors the kitchen scenes so well, wielding his star charisma so delicately, that our bullshit detectors never really go off. He’s a figure straight out of a coming-of-age movie. Despite Johnson’s deft handling of the more overtly fact-based (if still obviously fictionalized) Blackberry, Tony is better at showing a young man coming of age than it is explaining or, worse, paying tribute to Anthony Bourdain.

Sometimes the best thing a movie based on a true story can do is try to forget where it came from.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.