A Biographical Drama That Refuses to Worship Its Subject
Tony is an A24 biographical drama that compresses Anthony Bourdain’s formative Provincetown kitchen years into one summer, using immersive research and intuitive performance to portray the future icon as a flawed, self-destructive young man instead of a polished legend.
The most striking thing about Tony is that it opens not with greatness, but with failure. Matt Johnson’s film begins when young Anthony Bourdain, played by Dominic Sessa, misses out on a fellowship he was counting on and chooses Cape Cod over returning to Vassar. That choice—petty, romantic, impulsive—sets the tone. This Anthony Bourdain biography refuses to flatten him into a hero’s journey. Instead, Johnson, as director and co-writer, treats the summer as a crucible where arrogance, addiction, and appetite collide. The result is less monument and more confession, a story about how a celebrated writer and food connoisseur started to develop his voice by being forced to confront his worst instincts.
Casting Dominic Sessa and the Radical Choice to ‘Not Prepare’
If Tony works, it’s because Matt Johnson builds the entire biographical drama production around one belief: Dominic Sessa doesn’t need to imitate Bourdain to find him. Johnson met Sessa after his breakout in The Holdovers and left the restaurant convinced they could “shoot this movie with this kid tomorrow” because “he’s ready”. That confidence becomes the film’s organizing principle.
Instead of the usual biopic homework—accent drills, archival footage, exhaustive mimicry—Johnson gave Sessa an unconventional directive: “Don’t prepare… Please don’t learn anything. I want to put you in these situations and see what happens to you”. According to Johnson, “Yes, and that’s why the movie works!”. It’s a provocation, but also a philosophy. Tony is not about reproducing mannerisms; it is about catching a young man mid-mistake. Sessa, only a few years older than the 19-year-old Bourdain he plays, leans into being an “asshole and a fabulist,” but also a frightened kid impatient to become a man. The performance feels less like cosplay and more like possession, and Johnson’s risk pays off.
Recreating Provincetown and the Kitchens That Built Bourdain
For all Johnson’s spontaneity, Tony is not a careless film. Its makers treat Provincetown and its kitchens as sacred origin sites for Anthony Bourdain’s voice. The script adapts the early chapters of Kitchen Confidential, the memoir that exposed the “seedy, wonderful underworld of restaurant life in New York,” and condenses three chaotic summers on the New England coast into one. Co-writers Lou Howe and Todd Bartels describe wanting “to write a love letter to one of our heroes and a love letter to one of our favorite parts of the world, Cape Cod” and to focus on the beginning of Bourdain’s life, not the end.
That love letter starts with homework. The writers traveled to Provincetown to learn the town’s rhythms and drink beers in Bourdain’s favorite dive bar. On screen, we see Tony stumble drunk into The Flagship, get thrown out after harassing the bartender, and be taken in by Chef, played by Antonio Banderas. In that kitchen, washing dishes in a hammock-fueled limbo, he discovers timing, tradition, and the community clambake. Other cast members, like Stavros Halkias, arrived early to train in cracking lobsters so the restaurant work would feel lived-in rather than staged. This is an Anthony Bourdain biography built from grease, steam, and repetition, not tidy montage.
Finding Self-Honesty in a Spoiled, Narcissistic Lout
The film’s emotional gamble is to show Anthony Bourdain at his worst and trust that audiences will still follow him. By his own description, this “proto-Anthony” is “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good a*s-kicking” when he steps off the ferry. Johnson and Sessa don’t soften that. Tony drinks himself blind over a crush, chases chaos with his feral friend Sal, and witnesses addiction up close. There’s a key moment where Sal shoots up heroin and the camera stays on Anthony’s face—less a PSA than a quiet record of a kid watching a future he could fall into.
Yet amid the debauchery, Johnson threads something harder: the slow emergence of self-honesty. Chef teaches Tony to cook, behave like a gentleman, respect time, and honor old traditions. Those lessons don’t redeem him overnight, but they leave marks. The kitchen at The Flagship becomes what the film calls “the engine of his whole life,” igniting the passion that will carry him from line cook to global chronicler of culinary culture. By refusing to jump ahead to fame or to dwell on his suicide in 2018, the movie argues that the most radical way to honor Bourdain is to remember him as a young man learning, painfully, to tell the truth about himself.
Why ‘Tony’ Matters for Biopics and for Bourdain’s Legacy
Tony arrives into a landscape crowded with biographical drama production where famous lives are flattened into awards-season highlight reels. Johnson and his team push back. They make a small movie in scope—one summer in 1975 Provincetown—but large in implication. The focus on beginning rather than end is not accidental. As Bartels notes, they wanted “to remind ourselves, and eventually an audience, of why they loved him and what made him so special in the first place” by starting where his love of kitchens and his acerbic voice were born.
This A24 film about a young, often unbearable Tony is a rebuke to the hagiography that can smother icons. It treats Anthony Bourdain not as a brand, but as a kid who needed that “good a*s-kicking” to become the sharp, relatable writer millions still feel connected to. It also suggests a different future for biopics: cast for spirit, not resemblance; research places until they breathe; trust in unpolished behavior. As Tony heads from select theaters on August 7 to a wider release on August 21, it stands as a messy, affectionate argument that the most honest biographies start before the legend knows he’s being watched.
