TONY Review: Before He Was Bourdain, He Had to Get Honest With Himself

Anthony Bourdain spent his entire career telling the truth about kitchens, about food, about people, and about himself. That's why "Too Strong to Be Wrong" and Bourdain's whole ethos have always felt like they were speaking the same language to me. So when I heard A24 was putting out TONY, director Matt Johnson's origin story of Bourdain's summer of 1975 in Provincetown, I knew this one was going to hit different.

Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, and Lea Woodall in Tony

Spoiler-Free Thoughts

TONY isn't a cradle-to-grave biopic. It's not trying to cram Bourdain's entire life, the books, the shows, and the fame into two hours. Instead, Matt Johnson (BLACKBERRY, NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE) zeroes in on one summer: an 18-year-old kid from New Jersey, restless and overconfident, washing dishes in a Cape Cod seafood kitchen the summer before college. That's it. That's the whole canvas. And it works, because it lets the film breathe instead of racing through a highlight reel.

Dominic Sessa carries this movie. After THE HOLDOVERS put him on the map, he plays Tony as someone still fumbling around trying to figure out who he actually is, before the confidence and the voice we all know were fully formed. Antonio Banderas is the perfect counterweight as Chef, the mentor who sees the talent in Tony before Tony sees it in himself, but who isn't interested in indulging the kid's ego along the way. And Emilia Jones as Nancy gives the film its heart, she's the one character who sees straight through Tony's performance.

Emilia Jones in Tony

What got me, though, wasn't the plot. It was the theme underneath it. This is a movie about a young man who hasn't figured out how to be honest with himself yet, who's still faking and performing a version of who he thinks he's supposed to be. And watching him slowly, imperfectly, start to close that gap between the person he's pretending to be and the person he actually is? That's the whole movie for me. It's a reminder that we all get a little lost sometimes, we all fake it a little longer than we should, but the way forward is always the same: get honest with yourself first, then with everyone else. Stack enough of those honest moments together and the things that once looked impossible start to look reachable. That's not just Bourdain's story. That's everybody's story.

Composer Jay McCarrol (Johnson's longtime collaborator going all the way back to NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW) gives the film a score built around an old, creaky felt piano that somehow captures both the salt air of Provincetown and the uncertainty sitting underneath Tony's swagger. Paired with a soundtrack full of period needle drops, it's one of the best-sounding movies I've seen all year, and it's not close.

Matt Johnson made a deliberate choice not to let Bourdain's later, more tragic chapters hang over this film, and I respect that. This isn't a movie about how the story ends. It's a movie about how it started. It’s hopeful, chaotic, and searching. That's exactly the note it should be hitting.

Matt Johnson directs Dominic Sessa in Tony

A Little More Detail (Light Spoilers, No Ending Given Away)

If you want to go in completely clean, skip this section. But if you want a slightly deeper sense of what you're walking into:

The film leans hard into the "hangout movie" energy of that restaurant kitchen. Tony's coworkers, played by Leo Woodall, Stavros Halkias, Michael Jibrin, and Monica Raymund, each bring their own flavor of chaos, and Woodall in particular stands out as Sal, the reckless oyster shucker who represents everything Chef's discipline is trying to counterbalance. A lot of the film's best moments come from just sitting in that push-and-pull between the two of them, with Tony caught in the middle trying to figure out which direction he's actually supposed to go.

Tony's relationship with his parents — his permissive, encouraging father Pierre (Rich Sommer) and his high-standards mother Gladys (Dagmara Dominczyk) — also gets real space here, and it's clear Johnson wanted you to understand where some of Tony's contradictions come from before you ever see him pick up a knife. None of it feels like exposition. It feels lived-in.

And without spoiling where it lands, the film's final act brings the whole ensemble together around food , because if there's one thing this movie gets right about Bourdain, even this early version of him, it's that food was never really the point. People were.

FAQ

Is TONY a full biography of Anthony Bourdain's life? No. The film covers a single summer in 1975, before Bourdain became a chef, author, or TV host. It's an origin story, not a career retrospective.

Do you need to have read Kitchen Confidential or watched Parts Unknown to enjoy TONY? Not at all. The film stands on its own as a coming-of-age story. Fans of Bourdain's later work will pick up on some fun connective tissue, but it's not required viewing homework.

Who plays young Anthony Bourdain in TONY? Dominic Sessa, best known for his breakout role in THE HOLDOVERS, stars as the 18-year-old Tony.

Is TONY a sad movie because of how Bourdain's life ended? No! Director Matt Johnson intentionally kept the film hopeful and forward-looking rather than letting Bourdain's later life or death color the tone.

When and where does TONY take place? Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, during the summer of 1975.