Tony Review: Bourdain Biopic Ends Before He Gets Famous
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- "Tony" is a new biopic directed and co-written by Matt Johnson, starring Dominic Sessa as a teenage Anthony Bourdain during a formative summer dishwashing at a Provincetown seafood spot called the Flagship.
- The film adapts only the early chapters of Bourdain's 2000 bestseller "Kitchen Confidential," and saves revealing the character's full name until its final moments.
- Antonio Banderas plays "Chef," a meditative older Brazilian mentor who greets the ocean every morning and makes his own ketchup rather than buy Heinz, investing Tony with pride in manual kitchen labor.
- The story opens at Vassar College, where Bourdain spent two years before dropping out, before following a crush named Nancy — played by Emilia Jones — to Provincetown for the summer.
- Supporting cast includes Rich Sommer as Tony's father Pierre, Dagmara Domińczyk as his mother Gladys, Stavros Halkias, and Leo Woodall as kitchen co-workers.
- The reviewer characterizes the film as a "necessarily minor piece of storytelling" that "feels deceptively major," crediting Johnson and Sessa for capturing Bourdain's adolescent sense of possibility rather than imitating his later TV persona.
Why it matters: For a Bourdain biopic, the structural gamble is real: ending before the famous part means losing audiences who want the TV-host chapter. Johnson sidesteps that by centering the mentor-protégé bond with Banderas and the texture of a specific teenage summer, giving the film a literary weight that an impersonation-driven biopic couldn't reach.
