Before publishing bestselling books and before traveling the world and becoming a television icon, what was Anthony Bourdain really like? The film Tony, which has just arrived in theaters in the United States, attempts to provide an answer to the origins of a figure who captivated fans and those outside the culinary world.
Directed and co-written by Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson, and backed by the studio A24, the film revolves around a spoiled 19-year-old from New Jersey during the summer of 1975. After not winning a writing scholarship, Tony (Dominic Sessa) moves to Provincetown, a coastal town in Massachusetts, following the footsteps of his platonic love, Nancy (Emilia Jones).
Since he has no alternative if that plan fails, he ends up in the kitchen of a seafood restaurant. The owner, known simply as Chef (Antonio Banderas), offers him a deal: a hammock on his terrace in exchange for washing dishes. In that place, where he meets a group of kids led by the womanizer Sal (Leo Woodall), he will put his ego and ambition to the test.
Inspired by the first chapters of Kitchen Confidential, his classic bestselling book from 2000, the feature film approaches its character without reverence. Matt Johnson, who has received praise for the films BlackBerry (2023) and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025), admitted that he was not very close to Bourdain. That made it easier for the film to adopt an uninhibited tone and to choose to condense his youth into a limited period of time (in short, compressing three summers into one).
“We built the whole movie around that central idea: everyone has an idea of Anthony Bourdain. But, why not try to understand why he is the way he is? Because both (Dominic Sessa and he) actually believed that much of our personality and who we are is owed to our role models and the people we admire, for better or worse,” the director explained to GQ magazine.
In that interview, he also detailed that he was selective in choosing his supporting material. “I didn’t watch all his TV shows, because I was less interested in his adult persona and much more in what he said about his own life. And I read some really great books (…) I moved to Provincetown and thought: I better meet the people who still live there and knew him. And it was the combination of that, along with our shared interest – Dom’s (Sessa) and mine – in this self-made man, that really laid the foundation for the film,” he said, also highlighting that he identified Bourdain’s “superpower” as being that “he was much more vulnerable, hurt, and insecure than people perceived him to be.”
Tony has garnered praise from the specialized press. “Johnson maintains such a lively and carefree tone that you don’t need to know Bourdain to enjoy the film,” declared the Los Angeles Times, stating that “miraculously, it is the most touching comedy of the year.”
The New York Times was delighted that the film chose a specific moment in Bourdain’s life. In fact, it stated that “the film would be just as enjoyable even if its protagonist were a complete unknown.”
“The story is simple, but by focusing on this crucial fragment of a vibrant life, Johnson manages to capture something deeper and more universal than a broader approach might have allowed. Ultimately, this captivating film perhaps is less about the birth of a chef and more about the making of a man,” celebrated the same newspaper.
That same particularity generated questions from Rolling Stone magazine, which suggested that A24 might have chosen to change “the names to protect the guilty and shed the burden, since Tony works better as a compelling and slightly eccentric coming of age story if, and only if, you forget that the boy on screen is supposed to be Anthony Bourdain.”
“The combination of Johnson’s need to turn the story of an individual into something stubbornly universal, with a deliberate lack of affection for the subject, makes one wonder why they bothered to make it,” argued the outlet.
“That bet, overall, pays off. Johnson acknowledges that, essentially, it is a coming of age story about a rising star learning to free himself from the burden of a future better than he could have ever imagined; a boy discovering that no one can become who they pretend to be without first being who they really are. Tony struggles to find an ending, but it really doesn’t need one; the real fun lies in paving the way into the unknown,” IndieWire expressed.
Meanwhile, Variety suggested that with this film Dominic Sessa, who rose to fame with Fleeing (2023), becomes a star. “What a movie star needs (among other qualities) is anger, and Sessa plays Tony as an anxious, talkative, and repressed bad boy who is venting his inner torment in the real world,” it pointed out, also indicating that “Banderas delivers a fantastic performance, showing us how Chef becomes Tony’s mentor by being everything he is not: calm, composed, dedicated to the task, connected to something higher.”
After debuting in some U.S. cities last Friday, the feature film will have a national release on August 21. Its release in Latin America is not yet confirmed.
