Tony Review: Bittersweet Bourdain Origin Story
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- Tony is directed by Matt Johnson and stars Dominic Sessa as a young Anthony Bourdain in a mid-1970s Provincetown, Massachusetts coming-of-age story drawn from the opening chapters of Bourdain's memoir Kitchen Confidential
- Dominic Sessa, fresh from Alexander Payne's The Holdovers, plays the conceited yet lonely college student who runs away to a seaside resort and gets hired as a dishwasher by Antonio Banderas's kindly-stern chef
- Leo Woodall plays coke-addled womanising chef Sal, the sacrificial mentor figure who serves as both inspiration and warning to young Tony
- The reviewer notes the film's feelgood trajectory is compromised by Bourdain's 2018 suicide, with a scene where Banderas's character recounts the story of François Vatel—who killed himself when banquet ingredients failed to arrive—sitting "oddly" as what the reviewer calls a tacit acknowledgment of that fate
- Supporting cast includes Rich Sommer and Dagmara Domińczyk as Tony's parents Pierre and Gladys, with the review calling the overall result "a bittersweet dish"—watchable and entertaining but emotionally complicated by the author's real-life ending
Why it matters: The review frames Tony as a film that can never fully escape its subject's tragic end—every warm kitchen anecdote now carries the weight of Bourdain's suicide, and the Vatel scene the director added is read as an awkward but revealing signal of that unresolved tension. For audiences, the work lands not as a straight biopic but as a bittersweet origin myth haunted by what came after.
