TONY is A24’s new biographical drama from director Matt Johnson, based loosely on the early chapters of Anthony Bourdain’s own life, before the fame, before the television career, before he was “Bourdain” at all. The film is set in the summer of 1975, when a restless 19 year old Tony (Dominic Sessa) drifts into Provincetown, Massachusetts, and lands a job in a chaotic seafood restaurant kitchen.
What starts as a directionless summer job becomes the accidental beginning of everything that came after: the discipline, the obsession, the sense that a kitchen was somewhere he actually belonged. It’s not a cradle to grave biopic. It’s a snapshot of the exact moment a rudderless kid found his calling, months before he’d go on to enrol at the Culinary Institute of America.
A few things worth knowing about the real Anthony Bourdain
For readers who know Bourdain only from No Reservations or Parts Unknown, a bit of context helps this film land harder. Long before he was a global television personality, Bourdain spent decades working New York kitchens, eventually becoming executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles.
His breakout came in 2000 with the memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, a brutally candid, often unflattering account of restaurant life that turned him into a literary sensation almost overnight.
That same voice, unfiltered, curious, self-critical, went on to define his television career across more than two decades, right up until his death by suicide in 2018. He remains one of food media’s most influential figures, as much for his honesty about his own flaws as for his talent in the kitchen. TONY is, in a sense, the prequel to all of that: the summer before Bourdain became a writer’s subject, including his own.
There’s a version of this film that plays it safe. Cradle-to-grave biopic, talking heads, a highlight reel of Bourdain the icon we already know from No Reservations and Parts Unknown. TONY, directed by Matt Johnson (Blackberry), doesn’t bother with that film. Instead it plants us in one restless Provincetown summer in 1975, before the books, before the television career, before the man became a verb for curiosity itself. What we get is messier, funnier, and a lot more honest than a highlight reel could ever be.
We open at Vassar College, where a 19 year old Tony (Dominic Sessa, fresh off his breakout in The Holdovers) is pitching a novel to a fellowship panel that’s part Kerouac, part Orwell, and entirely bluster. He doesn’t get the fellowship. He does, almost by accident, get a summer in a Cape Cod kitchen, and that’s where the film properly begins.
Provincetown looks gorgeous here, all salt air and neon signage, shot by cinematographer Michael Bauman with the kind of warmth that makes you want to book a flight rather than a table. But the real setting is the kitchen itself: hot, loud, chaotic, and running on a code that Tony doesn’t understand yet. Anyone who’s worked a service shift will recognise the rhythm Johnson captures here, the barely controlled panic of a Friday night rush, dressed up as something almost romantic.
Antonio Banderas plays Chef, the restaurant’s owner and the first person to see something worth salvaging in Tony, even when Tony gives him every reason not to. Banderas plays him with a mix of exasperation and genuine warmth that anchors the film whenever Sessa’s Tony threatens to spiral.
Emilia Jones is Nancy, Tony’s love interest and, frankly, the character who complicates how sympathetic Tony actually is. Without giving away specifics, this is where the film asks its most interesting question: is young Bourdain a charming rogue, or is he a young man whose fixations and half truths cause real damage to the people around him? TONY doesn’t fully answer that for you, and I found that more compelling than a film that tried to.
Leo Woodall plays Sal, Tony’s friend and partner in crime through most of the chaos, providing a lot of the film’s loosest, funniest energy. Stavros Halkias is Dimitri, a fellow kitchen worker who becomes one of Tony’s steadiest allies on the line. Rich Sommer appears as Tony’s father, a presence that hangs over the film even in his limited screen time, and Dagmara Dominczyk and Monica Raymund round out a kitchen crew that feels lived in rather than sketched.
Pivotal moments, without the spoilers
For Tony himself, the turning point isn’t a single dramatic reveal, it’s the accumulation of small failures and small redemptions across the kitchen floor, including one genuinely alarming mishap involving fire that reframes how seriously he’s willing to take this job. Watching Sessa shift from performative confidence to something closer to real competence, scene by scene, is the film’s biggest achievement.
For Nancy, the pivotal moments come in the quieter scenes away from the kitchen, where the gap between how Tony sees their relationship and how she experiences it becomes harder to ignore. I won’t spell out where that thread lands, but it’s handled with more nuance than the marketing suggests.
For Chef, his key moment is less about plot and more about a shift in how he looks at Tony, the instant he stops seeing a problem employee and starts seeing potential. It’s a small, almost wordless beat, and it’s one of the film’s best.
Going in, I’ll admit I clocked the early Tony as a bit of a worry: the fixation on Nancy bordering on stalker-ish, the constant embellishing and outright lying to anyone who’ll listen. TONY doesn’t sand any of that off, and to its credit, it doesn’t ask you to forgive it either. What it does instead is show you where that restlessness, that hunger to be someone, eventually gets pointed in a direction that actually works. It’s less a biopic about a famous chef and more a coming of age film about a kid figuring out, almost by accident, what he’s for.
TONY is in Australian cinemas from 20 August
