Anybody who’s ever done restaurant work knows that you grow up fast in a kitchen.

The speed and urgency, the pressure cooker of it all — people thrown together in hot, confined spaces, trying to work in concert with each other without injuring themselves or each other or poisoning the customers, it’s a bubble life out of time, where the hundred deadlines a day can dictate your life’s path — who you sleep with and what pharmaceutical compromises you make just to make it from prep to closing time.

Anthony Bourdain knew this world better than most. He lived in it and then wrote about it, first with his blockbuster tell-all “Kitchen Confidential,” and then in the decades of TV food and travel shows that spun out of that culinary success.

He stressed respect for those “honored” to do this work — feeding the public — all through his writing and public pronouncements. And despite his carefully cultivated hipster/traveller/chef image, he’d let slip the cost of this grueling lifestyle while playing up the commitment it takes to thrive in it.

“Tony” is a thoroughly entertaining biography of the bookish dishwasher who became a chef, a man and a man of letters. Everything fans came to love about him is here — dashing Leonard Cohen look-alike, a world-weary traveller, sucking down another smoke, voice-over narrating with wit and an ear for old film noir style in the gravelly voice and performative cool of hosting exotic travel programs.

Matt Johnson, who made the equally entertaining and just as conventional “Blackberry” movie, takes us back to the mid ’70s, when a mop-topped, entitled poseur who loved calling himself a “writer” first struck a pose and came of age. This college kid talked the talk and lied the lies — all great writers are liars and “unreliable narrators” — and dropped literary names and the German word “bildungsroman” to describe what he planned to write and what he — by accident — actually wrote.

He was “coming of age” in his teens. But he really grew up when he had the life experience to “write what you know.” And what he knew was cooking and kitchens and Michelin stars and great food the world over.

We meet the upper middle class Jersey kid with Bruce Lee and New York Dolls posters in his room — and a very big globe at the foot of his bed — just as he’s throwing “I’m a writer, now” around and telling one and all he’s got this writing fellowship at Vassar in the bag.

The globe? That helps him “imagine” fantastical places “I’ll probably never” visit.

Dominic Sessa of “The Holdovers” and “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t” gets the awkwardness that 19 year old Tony Bourdain — “Only my mother calls me ‘Anthony.'” — figures his new status allows him to shake. That cute upperclasswoman (Emilia Jones) he had a crush on in high school? He comes right up to her in an approach both brazen and delusional.

He’s got nunchucks shoved down his pants, for Pete’s sake.

But maybe he’ll make some headway with her in the fall, at Vassar. Because he’s a writer destined for great things. And when he doesn’t get that fellowship? He lies to his family (Dagmara Dominczykm plays his bookish, hard-to-please mother and Leo Woodall of “Mad Men” is his dad). And he sets out to Provincetown on Cape Cod, because that’s where the fair Nancy will be spending her summer.

Seeing her in the arms of a cook at the pizza joint that’s her summer job sends him on a loutish, beer-fueled bender. And that’s how he ends up under the care of this demanding Portugeuse chef at The Flagship seafood house.

Antonio Banderas plays the great European chef making a living cooking for and running a “fast food” joint on the Cape. He takes the kid in and puts him to work washing dishes. The kitchen has three other cooks — the all-business Tyrone (Michael Jibrin), the profane and jovial Stavros (Stavros Halkias) and the two-fisted oyster shucker, unofficial “bouncer” and resident tough guy and drug experimenter, Sal (Leo Woodall of “Tuner” and “Nuremberg”).

Sal’s got the moves that Tony lacks. Sal’s confident around women, and creepy enough to take literal notches out of the woodwork of every place he beds one of the local lovelies there for the summer. Naturally, he and our noble chef are pitted against one another in the struggle to be the Big Influence on Tony’s future.

The plot is simplistic and director and co-writer Johnson never misses a chance to repeat a running gag — Tony’s daily wake-up dousing with a bucket of sea water, Tony’s uncultivated palate, which has him get sick over this or that dish when first he tastes it — and never avoids turning any cooking, food prepping or cleaning sequence into a musical montage.

One of them is set to the disco era “Hooked on Classics.” Hey, the ’70s, you had to be there, right? Actually that tune came out in late ’81, and Tony’s Provincetown apprenticeship took place in the “Jaws” summer of ’75.

But “sentimental” works, here. And anybody who ever did time in restaurant work will find a lot of ways this coming-of-age version of “How Tony Because Anthony” resonates.

Bourdain’s constant reminding us of where our food comes from — living things we kill and cook — is underscored in a couple of scenes.

Banderas embodies all that Bourdain saw as noble and admirable in chefs — modesty, perfectionism and humanity that a brutal business, with all its wear and tear and disappointments, never beats out of the great ones.

Woodall is repellently cool and Jones, the Oscar winner in this cast (for “CODA”) simply has to let the makeup, wardrobe, hair styling, lighting and framing elevate her to the Unattainable Beauty of many a boy’s youth.

But what I really like here is how unlikeable they make Young Bourdain. A written quote by AD opens the film, noting that at this age he was “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”

You could guess from his TV appearances that straight-shooter persona or not, he had his dark side and was his own version of an “unreliable narrator.” If you ever went to a restaurant he recommended owned “by my very good friend” and had the signature dish, you guessed that he didn’t “know” a lot of these “good friends” (“reality” TV) and he sure and shooting never had the specialty of the house — even if you want to excuse his “smoker’s palate.” And maybe the drugs.

Sessa and Johnson and his two co-writers capture the hauteur and neediness that came long before he’d been everywhere/eaten everything, the overreaching the led to a life where so much was within that reach.

And even if “Tony” isn’t a “great” film, it is a sentimental and pleasantly watchable recreation of how “Tony” became “Anthony,” and all the insecurities that never went away even after the drugs went away and fame took their place.

Rating: R, drug abuse, some violence, profanity throughout

Cast: Dominic Sessa, Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall, Dagmara Dominczykm Rich Sommer, and Antonio Banderas.

Credits: Directed by Matt Johnson, scripted by Todd Bartels, Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:46