If you ask any chef to name the person who inspired them to become a chef, more often than not they’ll say Anthony Bourdain. So, it’s about time for a movie about what inspired the influential foodie and writer to become a chef himself. And that’s what we get with Tony.
Set in 1975, Tony stars Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) as the 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain, aka Tony, a creative writing student at Vassar who, after losing out on a writing fellowship, follows a girl he likes named Nancy (Emilia Jones from CODA) up to Provincetown, Massachusetts for the summer. He stumbles into a job in a kitchen owned by a prestigious chef (Babygirl’s Antonio Banderas), a job that will change the course of his life. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Writer/director Matt Johnson (who is already having a banner year with Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie) wrings every ounce of drama out of the script that he wrote for Tony with cowriters Todd Bartels, Lou Howe, and Matthew Miller (the latter of whom is one of Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie collaborators). And it’s still not enough. Despite having one of the most exciting single kitchen sequences ever committed to film, Tony lacks conflict and drive. The action all seems manufactured and exaggerated, like the movie wants the stakes to be higher than they actually are, when in reality, it’s just about a guy trying to impress a girl. Sure, it winds up introducing him to what would be his lifelong passion, but he doesn’t know that yet. He’s just trying to get laid.
Bland story aside, the performances in Tony are top-notch. Dominic Sessa plays Tony exactly how the character needs to be played, with an annoying combination of bravado and cockiness and just enough likability to let the audience know that it’s his story. Emilia Jones’ Nancy is precisely the kind of girl that would make a guy run off from New Jersey to Massachusetts for the summer on the one-in-a-million chance that he might hook up with her.
Together, Sessa and Jones have a chemistry not unlike two kids on a schoolyard who like each other but are so cool that they pretend they don’t. And while Tony isn’t exactly a Hero’s Journey, Antonio Banderas’ Chef is a perfect Joseph Campbell Mentor to Our Hero. Throw in some good supporting roles from Leo Woodall (Tuner) and Stavros Halkias (Bugonia) as fellow kitchen workers, and the performances in the film are one of the best aspects of Tony.
The other notable aspect of the film is the music. The soundtrack is note-perfect, both the score and the incidental music. The score, composed by Jay McCarrol (another one of Johnson’s Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie guys), is a creaky, lo-fi masterpiece that captures both the Massachusetts vibe and the seafood restaurant theme. The incidental songs all evoke the seventies time period without leaning heavily on the stereotypical staples of the era. Together, the music in Tony is a sonic spectacle.
The first image onscreen in Tony is a quote from Bourdain himself that reads, “I was, to be frank, a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive, and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” This actually describes the young character in the film perfectly. Tony is a jerk, but he’s a forgivable jerk. And that’s what both the other characters in the film and the audience do with him – they forgive him. Tony is an antihero. The audience wants him to succeed because of his flaws and not in spite of them. And yes, by the halfway point, they also want to give him a good ass-kicking.
So, what Tony boils down to is a handful of interesting characters trapped in a mundane story. It’s interesting because of who the characters are and not because of what they do. There’s a bit of hero worship involved in the production, sort of like how things were earlier this year with Michael, so Anthony Bourdain fans will not only like this movie, they’ll fiercely defend it. And that’s fine, because Anthony Bourdain fans are exactly who this movie was made for.
GRADE: B-
Rating: R for pervasive language, drug use, and sexual content/nudity.
Runtime: 1 hour 46 minutes
Release Date: August 7, 2026 (limited), expands on August 21
Studio: A24
