In the second film of the summer that smooths the rough edges of a complicated man, we meet the future chef and global TV star Anthony Bourdain (played by Dominic Sessa) at age 19, blustering through a comically pretentious fellowship proposal for the dour-faced members of a faculty committee at New York State’s Vassar College.
At first, this young Bourdain is easy to imagine as a slightly older version of Sessa’s breakout role in The Holdovers (2023), as if the earlier film’s sullen and arrogant school student was now a sullen and arrogant college student – without the emotional growth brought about by Paul Giamatti’s dysfunctional history teacher.
“What I’m trying to do,” Sessa’s overly confident Bourdain tells the professors, “is create a metaphorical conversation between George Orwell and Jack Kerouac, as if Down and Out in Paris and London was typed out on one long piece of paper.”
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