Matt Johnson’s Tony arrives as a compact origin story, and it puts Dominic Sessa in the center of a young Anthony Bourdain’s life before the fame, the books and the television persona. The film is set in a Provincetown summer in 1975, when Bourdain is 19 and washing dishes in a seafood joint, right before he enrolled in The Culinary Institute of America.
That is why the Tony movie is drawing attention now: it is not about the swaggering celebrity chef people remember, but about the kid before the legend hardened. The film runs 1 hour 46 minutes, is rated R, and opens with a version of Bourdain that is still raw enough to feel unfinished, which is exactly the point of the exercise.
Sessa is excellent in the role. He catches both the charm and the restlessness, and he makes Bourdain feel like someone who is already pulling the room toward him even while he is still scrubbing dishes. Antonio Banderas, Emilia Jones and Leo Woodall also star, while Eric Ripert appears in a brief scene on the admissions panel, a sharp reminder of where the story is headed without turning the film into a history lesson.
The review’s best line calls Tony “more of a light bite than a full meal, but flavorful,” and that fits the way Johnson and the screenplay team approach this period. Todd Bartels and Lou Howe wrote from an original script, while Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller are the pair behind BlackBerry and Nirvana the Band the Movie, and that sense of controlled mischief carries into Tony. The film gives Bourdain charm and vulnerability, but it never fully sands off the edge; even here, with his parents, he still registers as a narcissistic blowhard at times.
What keeps the movie from feeling like a mere prelude is that it understands how little of a prelude life ever is. Bourdain is shown before Brasserie Les Halles, before more than 20 years as Eric Ripert’s friend and colleague, and long before the tragedy that came 43 years later. Tony does not pretend to explain all of that. It narrows in on one summer, one job and one hinge point, and that is enough to make the film’s answer clear: this is the moment when Anthony Bourdain’s story starts to smell like the one the world would eventually know.
