What to know
- Tony, directed by Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson, follows 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain during a pivotal summer in 1975.
- Dominic Sessa plays the future chef and author as an unlikeable, self-aggrandizing aspiring writer who stumbles into restaurant work.
- Antonio Banderas plays the restaurateur who gives Bourdain a job and eventually helps shift his outlook.
- The film draws from the opening chapters of Bourdain’s bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential.
- Despite knowing the charismatic figure Bourdain eventually becomes, Tony asks audiences to spend its runtime with the deeply flawed young man who came before him.
Set in 1975, Tony is a biopic about one summer in the life of 19-year-old pre-fame Anthony Bourdain, a lying, self-aggrandizing wannabe writer, who makes you wonder how he ever amounted to anything, let alone achieved global fame and respect.
Opening in theatres on Aug. 14, Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson (2025’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie; 2023’s BlackBerry) has an easy job bringing the audience along because we already know who Bourdain became: cool, curious and immensely likeable — a whole different person from the idiot we see in Tony.
This self-awareness was laid bare in his 2000 New York Times best-selling memoir, Kitchen Confidential, in which Bourdain lifted the lid on the craziness of the restaurant world, and in the process launched his writing career.
The film is based on the first two chapters — condensed into this life-changing summer — and opens with a line from the book: “I was – to be frank – a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” That sums up the Bourdain we meet in Tony.
Starring Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) as Bourdain, and Antonio Banderas as the restaurateur who saw something in him, Tony is portrayed as a total fuck-up. It’s hard to like the guy or even care what happens to him, except this is Tony — “only my mother calls me Anthony,” he says early on — we have to keep reminding ourselves.
The lying is set in motion after he fails to land a summer writing fellowship at Vassar College, where his pitch to the faculty is lofty: He wants to write a cross between George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
He really wants to be a writer. He tells his longtime crush Nancy — played by Emilia Jones (CODA, Locke & Key) — that he is a writer; she sees through his crap (yet seems intrigued). He tells his mom he got the fellowship after they call to tell him he did not, steals money from his dad, and follows Nancy to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where, of course, he tells her he got the fellowship and is there to write his novel.
But he ain’t got nothing.
After getting beaten up and tossed out of a seafood restaurant, the owner, known as Chef (Banderas), lets him sleep on his hammock, then offers him a job as a dishwasher, waking him up every morning by dumping a bucket of sea water on him. He tells them he can cook, another lie.
He is given a hard time by everyone in the kitchen, the oyster-shucking womanizer Sal, played by Leo Woodall (Tuner, The White Lotus), Stavros (Stavros Halkias) and Tyrone (Michael Jibrin). With Sal, he gets into drugs. But he is also, inexplicably, given more responsibility as a line cook, even though he still fucks up.
And so it goes, until some poignant chats with Chef tweak something in Bourdain’s brain. He wakes up one day without the aid of a bucket of sea water. That is the turning point.
There is a moment that would ordinarily be fleeting but takes us out of the movie: Chef tells Bourdain about 17th century majordomo François Vatel, who killed himself when the fish he ordered didn’t arrive on time. It snaps us back to reality: Bourdain took his life in 2018.
Tony ends with him going into admissions at CIA and telling the truth when asked if he only washed dishes for one summer. He also says his name is Anthony. A couple of sentences flash on the screen, reminding us that he worked as an executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles for many years and, at age 43, published Kitchen Confidential which sold millions of copies.
Tony gives every fuckup hope.
