‘Tony’ Review: Dominic Sessa Captures Anthony Bourdain Before the Confidence Became a Persona

Dominic Sessa gives a funny, restless and quietly vulnerable performance in Matt Johnson’s warm portrait of the summer Anthony Bourdain first discovered the kitchen, the misfits who inhabited it and the life he had not yet realized he wanted.

There is an inherent danger in making a film about Anthony Bourdain before he became Anthony Bourdain. His voice was so unmistakable, his persona so carefully sharpened and his curiosity so central to how millions of people understood food, travel and culture that any dramatization risks becoming an extended exercise in imitation. The leather jacket, the cigarette, the sarcasm and the cultivated disdain for anything false are recognizable enough to encourage caricature, while the knowledge of his death threatens to cast a shadow over every youthful mistake. Tony succeeds because it largely refuses both temptations. Matt Johnson is not interested in explaining the finished man or retroactively converting every experience into destiny. He instead finds Bourdain at 19, when the confidence was mostly theater, the talent was undisciplined and the person audiences would eventually know existed only in fragments.

Set during the summer of 1975, the film follows a directionless Tony after his imagined future as a writer fails to materialize. He talks as though success has already chosen him, embellishes plans that barely exist and treats certainty as something he can create by saying an idea loudly enough. When a writing fellowship goes to someone else, he continues speaking as though he won it. When Nancy, his former high school crush, mentions she will be spending the summer in Provincetown, he steals money from his father and follows her while insisting his arrival has nothing to do with her. He is arrogant, insecure, manipulative and frequently ridiculous, but Dominic Sessa plays those contradictions without turning the young Bourdain into either a prodigy awaiting discovery or a smug impersonation of the celebrity he would become.

Sessa’s work in The Holdovers suggested an actor unusually comfortable locating vulnerability beneath adolescent bravado, and Tony gives him a richer variation on that tension. His Bourdain lies because the truth feels intolerably small. He wants to be a novelist, an intellectual, a romantic and a man already in possession of an interesting life, even though he has done almost nothing to earn those identities. Sessa never plays the false confidence as simple vanity. Tony is inventing himself in real time because he has no idea who he is, and each boast is less a declaration than an experiment. He watches how other people respond, adjusts the story and keeps moving before anyone can expose the uncertainty beneath it.

That makes the film’s coming-of-age structure more interesting than the standard biographical origin story. Johnson is not tracing the moment Bourdain learned to cook well enough to become famous. He is observing the first environment in which his worst tendencies and greatest gifts suddenly became useful. The restaurant kitchen does not demand polish, pedigree or social grace. It rewards stamina, curiosity, tolerance for chaos and an ability to survive alongside people whose rough edges would disqualify them from more respectable spaces. Tony does not enter the Flagship because he recognizes a calling. He arrives broke, humiliated and in need of somewhere to sleep. The kitchen becomes formative precisely because it is the first place that does not require him to pretend he has already been formed.

The film gives Bourdain his day in court before turning him into an object of admiration. When we first meet him, he can be exhausting. He treats his parents’ concern as evidence of their limitations and speaks to his mother, Gladys, with the defensive condescension of someone who fears she sees through him. Rich Sommer gives Tony’s father, Pierre, a gentleness that makes the theft from his wallet sting, while Dagmara Dominczyk plays Gladys as a woman whose disappointment has arrived before the failure itself. Neither parent is reduced to an obstacle standing between a young genius and his destiny. They appear to understand that their son is bright, perhaps even gifted, but that intelligence has become another excuse for avoiding discipline.

Johnson’s refusal to flatter Tony is one of the film’s greatest strengths. The screenplay acknowledges his charisma without mistaking it for goodness and allows his dishonesty to create real consequences. He pursues Nancy with the certainty of someone who believes wanting another person should be sufficient to make himself desirable. Emilia Jones brings an understated intelligence to the role, although Nancy remains the film’s least developed major character. She is often positioned as the audience Tony wishes he could impress rather than someone with a fully articulated life beyond him. Jones makes her skepticism legible and gives their gradual connection a believable warmth, but the film never quite explains what she sees in Tony beyond the dangerous appeal of someone loudly determined to become more interesting than he currently is.

The more convincing romance is between Tony and the kitchen. Johnson understands that a professional restaurant can resemble both military deployment and traveling theater, with its own ranks, rituals, grudges, substances and improvised loyalties. The Flagship initially appears to Tony as a grimy place where people work because better options have disappeared. He slowly realizes that the kitchen offers a form of belonging unavailable in the polite environments where he has spent most of his life failing to fit. Its intensity focuses him. Its hierarchy gives him something to resist and something to respect. Its collective pressure transforms labor into performance, and the nightly rush provides the audience he thought he would find through writing.

The film is most alive when Tony is learning the language of that world. Washing dishes is initially beneath him because nearly everything is beneath the person he imagines himself to be, yet the repetition begins wearing away his theatrical self-importance. Advancement comes through competence rather than charm. The kitchen does not care whether he can use the word “bildungsroman” in conversation or invent a novel during an interview. If he is late, the consequences are immediate. If he fails, someone else absorbs the cost. For perhaps the first time, Tony encounters an environment where intelligence without execution is worthless.

Antonio Banderas brings the film its emotional center as the restaurant’s unnamed Chef. He could easily have become the familiar mentor who recognizes genius before the young man recognizes it himself, but Banderas resists that sentimental route. Chef sees potential, though he also sees immaturity, arrogance and the possibility that Tony will destroy an opportunity simply because he has not yet learned to value it. His guidance is practical rather than prophetic. He provides a job, a hammock and enough trust for Tony to either grow or embarrass himself. The performance carries a melancholy sense of someone who has already completed the ambitious portion of his life and now finds meaning in recognizing hunger in another person.

Banderas is especially effective because he does not play Chef as a faded version of Bourdain. The man’s attendance at Portuguese Mass, his history in European kitchens and his restrained authority suggest an interior life the film deliberately leaves partially obscured. He has stories, but unlike Tony, he does not need to tell all of them to prove they occurred. Their relationship becomes a quiet lesson in the difference between experience and performance. Tony has built an identity out of things he intends to do; Chef has built one from work he no longer needs to advertise.

Leo Woodall nearly steals the film as Sal, the oyster shucker who first introduces himself by throwing Tony out of the restaurant and later becomes his closest friend. Sal possesses the confidence Tony has been faking, but it comes attached to volatility, appetite and almost no instinct for self-preservation. Woodall gives him the seductive recklessness that made his performance in The White Lotus so effective, yet he also finds tenderness beneath the swagger. Sal can drink, fight, charm and destroy with equal spontaneity, but his loyalty to Tony gives their friendship more emotional substance than the film’s romance.

Their connection works because Tony is simultaneously intimidated by Sal and desperate to resemble him. Sal appears to have solved the problem of masculinity through force of personality. He never seems embarrassed, never apologizes for desire and treats consequences as inconveniences awaiting the next distraction. Tony mistakes that freedom for self-knowledge before gradually recognizing the damage beneath it. Woodall’s performance prevents Sal from becoming merely the reckless friend whose collapse teaches the protagonist responsibility. His loyalty is genuine, his danger is real and his sadness exists without requiring a speech to explain it.

The supporting kitchen ensemble gives the restaurant its communal texture. Stavros Halkias and Michael Jibrin bring humor and familiarity to roles that could have functioned as period decoration, while Monica Raymund gives Mary an authority that makes the dining room feel like an extension of the kitchen’s command structure rather than a separate world. The film understands that restaurants are built from overlapping communities of people who may never willingly spend time together outside work but become fiercely protective once service begins. That paradox would later become central to Bourdain’s writing, and Tony wisely allows us to see him absorbing it before he possesses the language to describe it.

The connection to Kitchen Confidential is obvious, but Johnson avoids treating every kitchen incident as the origin of a famous observation. There is cocaine, shouting, danger, sex and the sensation that a bad night could become either a disaster or a story everyone tells for years. Yet the movie’s most persuasive insight is quieter: Bourdain did not initially fall in love with culinary refinement. He fell in love with the people, pressure and hidden society of restaurant work. Food becomes the medium through which he accesses a world of outsiders who communicate through labor, cruelty, humor and mutual dependence.

Tony’s proposal for a lobster thermidor special crystallizes both his potential and his arrogance. He sees an opportunity, imagines himself capable of meeting it and leaps before determining whether confidence can substitute for knowledge. I recognized in that impulse the same quality that would later make Bourdain such an arresting writer and broadcaster. He was willing to enter unfamiliar worlds, ask questions that more cautious people might avoid and trust that curiosity could carry him through. The film also understands the dangerous reverse of that trait: conviction can become recklessness when a person assumes wanting to succeed is equivalent to being prepared.

Johnson stages Tony’s rise and collapse without turning the setback into melodramatic punishment. The failure matters because it finally pierces the mythology he has constructed around himself. Until then, embarrassment has been something he can escape through another lie, another town or another invented plan. The kitchen makes evasion impossible because everyone witnesses the consequences together. Tony must remain in the room with people he disappointed and decide whether humiliation is proof he does not belong or simply the price of learning.

That distinction gives the film its emotional substance. Coming-of-age stories often frame maturity as the acquisition of confidence, but Tony already possesses too much of the counterfeit version. His growth requires accepting uncertainty, acknowledging failure and discovering that self-respect comes from returning after embarrassment rather than avoiding it. The film never suggests he becomes a finished man by the end of the summer. It offers something more credible: the first occasion on which he recognizes that becoming good at something may require him to stop performing the person he hopes to become.

As someone familiar with Bourdain’s work, I appreciated the film’s restraint around his eventual death. There are no ominous images announcing tragedy, no lines engineered to sound devastating in retrospect and no attempt to turn youthful sadness into a diagnosis. That decision feels both ethically responsible and dramatically intelligent. Suicide does not retroactively explain an entire life, and a film about Bourdain should not reduce every moment of joy, hunger or self-invention to foreshadowing. Tony allows him to be alive in 1975 rather than already haunted by what audiences know will happen in 2018.

The absence of that shadow does not mean the film ignores melancholy. Jay McCarrol’s score often introduces a subdued unease beneath the summer warmth, and Michael Bauman’s cinematography turns Provincetown into a place suspended between possibility and impermanence. The pink Cape Cod light softens the edges of a town filled with people who appear to be passing through, hiding out or trying on alternate versions of themselves. Tony’s summer feels significant partly because everyone understands it will end.

Bauman photographs the town with affection but avoids turning it into a glossy tourist advertisement. The beaches, restaurants and cramped houses have texture, and the location work gives the film a sense of physical memory. I did share the concern that Provincetown’s established queer culture feels curiously peripheral. Mary and her partner provide the primary acknowledgment of a community that was already essential to the town’s identity by the mid-1970s. A film interested in Bourdain’s attraction to outsiders could have drawn a richer connection between his discovery of kitchen culture and the broader social refuge Provincetown represented.

The period detail is otherwise handled with refreshing restraint. Costumes and production design establish 1975 without making every room look assembled for a nostalgia catalog. Johnson uses music selectively, allowing tracks from Eric Burdon and the Animals, Richard and Linda Thompson and Kool & the Gang to carry atmosphere without turning the film into a jukebox. “A Fifth of Beethoven” provides the most overtly dynamic sequence, even if its 1976 release makes it an anachronism. In a film this carefully grounded, the historical slip is noticeable, though the energy of the scene nearly justifies it.

Johnson also folds in references that reflect Bourdain’s cultural appetite without placing a fluorescent circle around them. The sight of Jaws paired with Violent City on the Wellfleet Drive-In marquee is both a period joke and a small indication of the pop-cultural mixture that would later animate Bourdain’s writing. He could move from fine dining to exploitation cinema, from literature to punk music and from culinary technique to lowbrow pleasure without treating curiosity as a hierarchy. Tony begins locating that sensibility before he has learned how to articulate it.

The film’s slenderness is both its limitation and its purpose. It does not offer the dramatic sweep generally associated with a biopic, nor does it attempt to summarize the many contradictions of Bourdain’s later life. Viewers hoping for a comprehensive account of his career, addiction, television work or cultural influence will not find it here. The narrative occasionally ambles, and Nancy’s underwritten role prevents the romantic thread from carrying the weight assigned to it. Even so, I found the narrow focus increasingly moving because it protects the film from the false authority of hindsight.

Tony does not claim to know the precise moment Anthony Bourdain became inevitable. It understands that no life works that neatly. The summer in Provincetown matters because it gave an intelligent, dishonest and insecure teenager somewhere to direct his appetite. He entered a kitchen believing the world had failed to recognize him and left beginning to understand that recognition might have to be earned.

Dominic Sessa captures the young man before the cadence, the books, the television persona and the practiced confidence. He finds someone cocky enough to be infuriating, lost enough to be recognizable and curious enough to suggest the person he may become. The result is not a definitive portrait of Anthony Bourdain, nor should it be. It is something gentler and perhaps more honest: a tender account of the first summer in which Tony stopped inventing a future long enough to begin building one.

THAT’S A WRAP | TONY

CREDITS
Release Date: Friday, August 7
Cast: Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall, Monica Raymund
Director: Matt Johnson
Screenwriters: Todd Bartels, Lou Howe, Matt Johnson, Matthew Miller
Studio: A24
Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes
Rating: R

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Joanthan P. Moustakas

Jonathan P. Moustakas founded The Cinema Group in 2020 during the challenges of the pandemic, after losing the vital ability to find community in theaters and escape through the captivating magic of cinema. Feeling profoundly cut off from the vibrant film community he cherished, he sought to create a welcoming home for dedicated cinema fans while providing engaging, daily curated content that resonates with their passions. Years later, The Cinema Group has blossomed from a small collective of loyal fans into a thriving brand that reaches millions of audiences every month across a diverse array of platforms and mediums.

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