Tony finds Bourdain at nineteen and is in no hurry to make him a legend
Matt Johnson trades the rise-and-fall biopic for a single unfinished summer, and lets his subject stay as unresolved as any teenager.
By MIGUEL MATEO | JULY 29, 2026
There is a version of this film that opens at a funeral and works backwards, and it is a relief that Matt Johnson had no interest in making it. Tony, the A24 portrait of Anthony Bourdain from the director of BlackBerry and Nirvanna the Band the Show, gives us Bourdain long before he became the icon the world knew, a nineteen-year-old washing up in Provincetown in the summer of 1976 with no apron, no reputation, and no clear idea of what he is about to become. Johnson stays inside that one season rather than sprinting through a life, and the film is far better for the restraint.
What hangs over every frame is a kind of inevitability. Johnson seems more interested in hinting at the struggles that would later define Bourdain than in celebrating the talent he would eventually become, and the film keeps its gaze fixed on the messy, searching kid rather than the legend waiting somewhere down the road. That choice may not satisfy everyone. But it is refreshing to see a biopic unafraid to present its subject as frustrating and unfinished, still figuring out who he is. After all, what nineteen-year-old isn't.
It helps that the film has no real interest in flattering him. This Bourdain is not an especially likable young man. He lies almost reflexively, bending every situation to his own advantage, and Johnson never softens the edges to make the audience more comfortable. And yet you find yourself rooting for him anyway, just a little, which is its own quiet trick of characterization. Dominic Sessa commands the screen throughout. Coming off The Holdovers, he brings the same loose, wounded charm and the same knack for holding a downcast look until it lands, carrying a film that lives or dies on whether we buy this kid as someone worth following.
The other half of that equation is Antonio Banderas, leading a magnificent supporting cast as the restaurateur who takes the young Bourdain under his wing. The film borrows its animating idea from Bourdain's own confession that he was, in those years, badly in need of a good ass-kicking, and Banderas is the one who delivers it. In his later years he has quietly become a consummate thespian, an actor who brings characters to life with so much lived-in internal life that none of it has to be spelled out in the writing. You simply feel it, in the mannerisms, in the small unhurried gestures. He is so good he almost steals the picture out from under its own star.
Johnson shoots all of this with the handheld, improvisational looseness that has become his signature, and the result feels less like a prestige biopic than a warm, unpretentious hangout movie from an earlier era. There are good needle drops, a cozy seventies texture, and a genuine belief running underneath it all that cooking is a way into other people and other cultures rather than an end in itself. That belief is the closest thing the film has to a thesis, and it is a generous one. When the story eventually gestures toward the wider Bourdain still to come, it feels almost unnecessary, because the summer alone has already told us what we need to know about the man.
The real measure of Tony is that you could strip Bourdain's name off it entirely and still be left with a sturdy, affecting coming-of-age film about a difficult young man finding a foothold. That it happens to be about one of the most beloved cultural figures of the last few decades is almost a bonus. Johnson has resisted the urge to explain his subject, choosing instead to sit beside him for one formative summer and trust that it is enough. It is.
Rating: ★★★★ out of ★★★★★
In Theaters August 7, 2026
Directed by Matt Johnson | Written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe | Starring Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, Emilia Jones, Leo Woodall, Dagmara Domińczyk, Rich Sommer, and Stavros Halkias