Name: Tony
Genre: Drama, Biography
Released: 2026-08-28
Duration: 1 h 46 min
Rating: 6.5
Cast: Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, Leo Woodall, Emilia Jones, Stavros Halkias

Distance: Near to Far

12 AM To 8 AM

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Set before fame found him, Tony follows a young Anthony Bourdain as an unexpected restaurant job opens the door to a world that forever changes his future, purpose, and passion.

Tony

Times of India

India Today

Writer-director Matt Johnson ends his movie where Anthony Bourdain’s life as a multihyphenate begins. So, if you expect to see Bourdain in action as a celebrity chef or renowned television figure, none of it will happen. Instead, what you have is a 19-year-old conceited, egotistical, dishonest, but vulnerable college student who doesn’t yet know that he will become one of the most distinctive voices in food and travel television.
Co-written by Johnson, Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels, and Lou Howe, the biopic opens with Bourdain’s quote, “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” In due course, the viewer realises that each word was true.
It’s 1975 at Vassar College, where Tony haughtily pitches a writing fellowship project about a dialogue between George Orwell and Jack Kerouac. He is sure to bag the fellowship and confidently announces to his family and his crush, an older girl named Nancy (Emilia Jones), that he is going to be a great, big writer. But when he is turned down, he can’t take the rejection and heads to Provincetown to meet Nancy, who is now dating someone else.
What follows is his stint at a restaurant, Flagship, where he meets his boss (Antonio Banderas) and a rowdy, coke-addicted womaniser chef, Sal (Leo Woodall). An incident at the restaurant changes Tony’s relationships with Nancy and his boss, brings him face-to-face with his insecurities, and teaches him to be honest with himself.
There is no frenzy of a high-stakes kitchen setting, the thrill of travel, or the genius Bourdain would later be hailed for. The movie instead simmers like a slow-cooking stew. The narrative is more of an acquired taste, and those looking for a conventional, dramatic biopic may find it unpalatable. But it is emotional and nuanced, especially with the subtle meta-references to the man Tony would eventually become. For instance, Tony claims the novel he is working on is a bildungsroman (German for a coming-of-age or growth story, though he mispronounces it as ‘buildings Roman'), which is what the movie itself is. His boss also talks about Louis XIV’s chef, François Vatel, who died by suicide after fearing that key ingredients for a banquet would not arrive — an anecdote that will remind one of Bourdain’s own fate in 2018.
Michael Bauman’s cinematography gives the 1970s summer a perfect look and feel, with the beaches, the people, and the glimpses we get of the kitchen.
Dominic Sessa shines as Tony, getting his conceitedness and vulnerability just right. Antonio Banderas, as his disciplined, religious, strict yet kind mentor, is brilliant. Leo Woodall is impressive as the roguish and volatile chef, while Emilia Jones makes an impact in her role.
Tony’s slow-burn treatment may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but those willing to savour rather than devour it will find plenty to chew on.

Anthony Bourdain is one of those cultural figures whose shadow has become almost impossible to separate from the man himself. The chef, writer and traveller we remember is so fully formed in popular memory that making a film about his younger years comes with an obvious problem: how do you tell the story of a man before he became the person everyone knows?
Tony makes an interesting choice. The film doesn’t try to explain the legend. It goes looking for the restless, occasionally obnoxious 19-year-old who hadn’t figured himself out yet.

Directed by Matt Johnson, the film follows a young Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) during a formative summer in Provincetown in the 1970s. An aspiring writer with more confidence than direction, Tony arrives hoping to pursue a girl, Nancy (Emilia Jones), but ends up taking a job as a dishwasher at a seafood restaurant. There, under the watchful eye of veteran chef Ciro (Antonio Banderas), he is introduced to the punishing, chaotic and oddly seductive world of professional kitchens.

It is less a conventional biopic than a coming-of-age story with the benefit of hindsight. And that hindsight is both the film’s greatest strength and its most interesting complication.
Sessa is terrific as Tony. He doesn’t attempt an imitation of the older Bourdain audiences know from Kitchen Confidential or Parts Unknown. Instead, he finds the insecurity underneath the swagger. This Tony is arrogant, funny, self-absorbed and occasionally difficult to like. He thinks he is destined for something but has little idea what that something might be.

Sessa makes that uncertainty palpable. There is a restlessness to his performance that feels particularly suited to a young man who hasn’t yet found the thing that will give his life direction. Tony’s transformation isn’t dramatic in the conventional sense. He doesn’t suddenly discover a calling and become a brilliant chef. He simply begins to understand that talent without discipline, curiosity without humility and ambition without work don’t amount to much.
The kitchen becomes his education. Banderas is excellent as Ciro, the chef who sees something in Tony but has no interest in flattering him. Their relationship gives the film its emotional backbone. Ciro isn’t presented as the magical mentor who unlocks Tony’s genius; he is someone who understands that sometimes the most useful thing you can give a young person is a hard lesson.

Banderas brings authority without turning Ciro into a caricature of the tough chef. There is affection beneath the discipline, and the performance gives the film some of its most quietly moving moments.
The restaurant itself is almost a character. The kitchen is sweaty, loud, aggressive and chaotic, but also oddly communal. Johnson captures the rhythm of the work—the repetition, the shouting, the exhaustion—and understands why a place like this could simultaneously repel and attract someone like Tony.

There is also plenty of humour. The film doesn’t treat Bourdain’s early years as some solemn origin myth. It allows him to be young and foolish. That makes the eventual transformation more convincing.

The film is at its best when it resists the temptation to turn every detail into evidence of the legend to come.

That restraint is important because Tony is not really about how Anthony Bourdain became Anthony Bourdain. It is about how a young man began acquiring the qualities that would later define him: curiosity, an appetite for experience, an ability to observe people and, perhaps most importantly, a willingness to enter worlds that were unfamiliar to him.

The film’s fictionalisation helps here. Rather than treating Bourdain’s memoir as a historical record, Johnson uses it as a starting point. Some characters and incidents are composites or inventions, allowing the film to pursue an emotional truth rather than a Wikipedia version of events.
But that approach also means the film can occasionally feel too slight for the man at its centre. We know what Bourdain would eventually become. We know the extraordinary life waiting ahead of him. Tony deliberately refuses to rush towards it, but that restraint can sometimes make the story feel like an appetiser when the subject seems capable of an entire feast.

The romantic thread with Nancy is another area where the film feels less developed. Emilia Jones brings warmth to the role, but the relationship is ultimately more useful to Tony’s journey than it is fully explored on its own terms.

There is also a bittersweetness that hangs over the film whether it wants it or not. Knowing Bourdain’s eventual fate inevitably changes the way we look at this carefree summer. Moments of youthful possibility carry an additional weight because we know how much life lies ahead—and how little of it the audience is being shown.

The film chooses to remember Bourdain before the fame, before the travel shows and before the mythology hardened around him. That makes the film warmer than expected and, at times, more affecting than a conventional rise-to-fame biopic might have been.

Tony(2026)