Tony

Summer 1976, Cape Cod. Anthony Bourdain is nineteen, wants to be a writer, and takes a summer job in the kitchen of a Provincetown restaurant. The owner-chef, a Brazilian-born man, takes him under his wing. That is the film — no travel, no television, no fame. The story ends decades before anything begins of what Bourdain is known for.

For anyone who doesn't know the name: Anthony Bourdain was born in New York in 1956 and spent two decades in New York kitchens, ending up as chef at Brasserie Les Halles. In 1999 he published a piece in The New Yorker about what actually goes on in restaurant kitchens; out of it grew Kitchen Confidential (2000), the book that made him famous overnight at forty-four and after which the public looked at the restaurant business differently. Television followed: A Cook's Tour, No Reservations, and from 2013 the Emmy-winning Parts Unknown on CNN, which made him a figure known worldwide. His programmes were ostensibly about eating, but really about the people who cook: Bourdain treated travel as listening rather than consuming, and wasn't afraid to talk politics over a bowl of soup. He died in 2018, aged sixty-one. Tony is set twenty-four years before Kitchen Confidential — at a point when none of this was yet visible.

It opens with a quotation from Bourdain himself, from Kitchen Confidential: "I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking." That sentence is the film's operating principle. Matt Johnson deliberately avoided the reverent biography: he felt the life and the legend came with too much baggage, so he took the single summer when his protagonist was still just an insufferable teenager. He also put something of his own life into it — the disapproving mother in the film is modelled on his own, not on Bourdain's.

Matt Johnson is a Canadian director best known here for BlackBerry (2023); his earlier films, The Dirties (2013) and Operation Avalanche (2016), worked from the same handheld, chaotic, comic energy. Tony is the first he has made without his own regular company and without guerrilla methods.

Dominic Sessa plays the title role — his first lead since The Holdovers — with Antonio Banderas as the chef, alongside Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall, Rich Sommer, Dagmara Domińczyk and Stavros Halkias. Michael Bauman is the cinematographer.

A24 released the film in August 2026. The reception has been good but not unanimous: several critics credit Johnson with dodging the traps of the conventional biopic, while others argue he looks at his subject too fondly — the Rolling Stone reviewer went so far as to call it not a biopic but a superhero origin story. What the reviews agree on is that Sessa's performance carries it.