Tony Review: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Lout

Tony, the biographical study of the young Anthony Bourdain, begins with a quote from the legendary chef, author, and traveler about himself as a teen, and it’s far from complimentary.

Even if the film inevitably takes such narrative shortcuts and indulges a few ahistorical lapses as are seemingly requisite for the biopic format, Bourdain would probably appreciate that it has no interest in letting him off the hook.

Instead, as played by Dominic Sessa, the 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain gets his ass kicked, literally and metaphorically, and comes out of that battering for the better. A dash of purpose, that tousle-haired swagger so obvious in those early photos as he became the bad boy of the culinary world, and the first seeds of the clear-eyed self-critique that would later stand in for modesty.

Rather than attempt a cradle-to-grave life story, director Matt Johnson (BlackBerry, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie) pulls the story into one fascinating but underdiscussed period of Bourdain’s life: the summer of his first kitchen job, cleaning dishes in a seafood restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Even though the chef wrote about it in his career-defining memoir, Kitchen Confidential, he obfuscated some details. It’s arguably OK that Johnson (who co-wrote the script) plays fast and loose himself.

He does restore one fact, the name of the little diner changed from the fictitious Dreadnaught of the book back to the real-life Flagship. Tony gets the job there after borderline stalking his high-school crush (Emilia Jones, CODA, The Running Man) to the island, trying to impress her with false claims about getting a scholarship to write the Great American Novel. Broke, drunk, surly, and churlish, he basically falls into a job and eventual tutelage under the nameless Chef (Antonio Banderas) and a dysfunctional proxy family in the kitchen of the Flagship.

In a place of drunken, strung-out obscenities and men at the end of their rope, Banderas is enthroned as a cruel-to-be-kind philosopher king, giving Tony the ass-kicking he so richly deserves and desperately needs. The seeming antithesis of Tony’s unforgiving mother (Dagmara Domińczyk) and indulgent father (Rich Sommer), his cliched tough love is given warm life through Banderas’ rumbling compassion.

However, this is Sessa’s film, and he imbues Tony with the fury of callow youth, kicking rocks under his bell-bottom jeans and lying readily to get what he wants. Most importantly, the star of The Holdovers understands that he’s not embodying the character of Tony from Vassar dropout all the way to world-renowned globe-trotting advocate for good food. Instead, it’s about getting Tony from being the spoiled brat who stews silently at his mother and punches holes in the wall when he doesn’t get his own way, to becoming the man who has the potential to become Anthony Bourdain. Tony is about the pricking of his pretensions to becoming a great author as much as it is about his growing fascination with the act of cooking and sharing meals. Johnson subtly juxtaposes the tension of family dinners with the bonhomie of sharing Chef’s disgusting squid stew after hours with the Flagship’s kitchen crew, elegantly dissecting the emotional mechanisms of this workplace with as much insight but more compassion than he did with BlackBerry’s evisceration of startup culture.

But it’s not just about the real Bourdain’s relationship with and philosophy about food. It’s about addiction, his selfish romanticism and easily wounded ego, and especially about his urge to travel. In the slope-shouldered punk who jumps onto a ferry with naught but a battered duffel bag are the stirrings of the man who lived out of a suitcase for much of the last years of his life. Even if he does a lot of growing up across that one summer, he’s still recognizably himself, and that’s the very epitome of a meaningful biopic.

Find movie times.

This article appears in August 14 • 2026.