Review: Tony (2026)

You don’t need to be a fan of or even know much about the late food writer and chef, Anthony Bourdain, to enjoy Matt Johnson’s biopic, Tony. It is less a standard biopic and more a focused account of the summer of 1975 when the future writer of Kitchen Confidential spent time in Provincetown, Massachusetts working in a seafood restaurant. It’s about the lessons the future celebrity chef would learn over the summer and the first glimmers of his changing understanding of food and food culture. It’s an entertaining but also wistful film, which flirts with—but in my mind never crosses over to—being too cute. It also has two of the year’s best performances in Dominic Sessa as Tony and Antonio Banderas as the chef who helps get this young vagabond on the right track.

From what I understand, Tony plays fairly fast and loose with the events as described in Kitchen Confidential of Bourdain’s summers in Cape Cod. What it rests its drama on is the famous line the writer used to describe his 19-year-old self:

I was—to be frank—a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.

Enter Dominic Sessa as Tony, his shaggy hair, tall, lanky build, and hound dog eyes credibly of the era in a way few actors nowadays can pull off. Tony’s mostly interested in girls while fostering dreams of becoming a writer. Having just finished a year at Vassar College, he is frustrated at the prospect of spending a summer with his family in New Jersey. The film begins with the first of his many lies and manipulations, as he pretends he has secured a writing grant for the summer. At the college bar he runs into Nancy (Emelia Jones), a girl he’s been infatuated with for years and she mentions she is going to be summering in Provincetown. He tells her his writing residency is in Cape Cod and up and heads out to Provincetown, ostensibly to follow this girl, but the film gives one a sense that while the interest in Nancy is real, his restlessness and lack of focus is greater than simply a crush on a girl. And so Tony shows up, sees Nancy at the local watering hole from afar and realizes she has a boyfriend. He then proceeds to get drunk at a local seafood restaurant, the Flagship, and subsequently knocked on his ass for being belligerent.

However, the chef of the Flagship (Banderas) has pity on him and lets him sleep on the hammock behind his beach house. He offers Tony a job washing dishes in the restaurant and Tony accepts. When he encounters Nancy again, she invites him to a party that night. He continues to lie about his writing grant, and passes off his fellow kitchen worker, Sal (Leo Woodall), as his grad student mentor. Sal, it turns out, is older than Tony, but hardly wiser. Sal drinks and sleeps his way around town, introducing Tony to drugs and just being a general shit-disturber. When Sal’s drug problem gets out of control and he arrives at work late one day, violating one of Chef’s prime rules, Tony is promoted to food prep, and he gets the first glimmers of the role food will play in his life.

Matt Johnson’s direction gives the film an easy-going but attentive feel to the world he’s capturing. The camera is focused on the faces of the characters, close-ups with a narrow depth-of-field, capturing their subtle emotional shifts and personalities. Intercut with the close-ups is the setting of Provincetown, feeling authentically lived in and avoiding the sterility of so many contemporary environments: there are fish crates and peeling paint, but also the glow of a beach town in summer. The late nights and summer days of Cape Cod look particularly appealing, but he also captures the stress and bad behaviour of the kitchen crew at the Flagship. There are traces of The Bear in the way the film combines personal crises, introspection, and restaurant culture, but this film isn’t as reverent of food and restaurant work as a way of life and calling. Tony is less about the food itself, and more about how the young protagonist will discover its rewards through the mentorship of Chef and at the same time learn something about himself and his unfocused and selfish character.

As a film, Tony is edited at a nice brisk pace, never outstaying its welcome. But we don’t feel the film is rushing us through scenes. It’s in those close-ups and character moments that Tony plays to its greatest strength: its strong central performances. Dominic Sessa, who I first saw in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, is excellent, imbuing young Tony with enough of a prickly personality to make his bad behaviour ring true. But Sessa so deftly moves between being the enfant terrible and a kid looking for some kind of direction. As I mentioned earlier, his face and body language feels authentically of its era and the kind of character Tony is at this point. Johnsons’ direction plays to Sessa’s strengths as an actor in those close-ups when he allows a scene a bit of breathing room. Sessa conveys a character who is himself putting on an act, for those around him and to himself ultimately. The central question is when will Tony admit this truth and embrace a kind of authenticity that will go on to make Anthony Bourdain such a cult figure in the world of food.

It’s a strong lead role, only perhaps outshone by Antonio Banderas as Chef. Chef manages to avoid simply being the inspiring genius or the hardass mentor. Banderas imbues the role with a kind of knowing world-weariness, which at this stage of his career comes naturally. But there’s a warmth to him as well. He likes what he does and he takes pride in his small seafood restaurant. It’s that mix of contentedness and pride that makes Chef so intriguing to both Tony and the viewer. Banderas has really shown in his later years his strength as a performer; he still has his charisma and now-grey-tinged good looks, but he’s more varied in the roles he takes on and like the character of Chef, doesn’t feel like he has anything to prove. This is the kind of late-career role that I love seeing actors recognized for.

Leo Woodall’s Sal is also very good. He’s a mess. He’s got that New England boyish-but-rough -and-tumble good looks, like a Cape Cod James Dean. We’re drawn to him like Tony is, but we also immediately recognize he is trouble. Stavros Halkias basically plays himself as fellow kitchen worker, Stavros, providing comic relief and a believable zeal for food. Emelia Jones is fine as Nancy, but she is ultimately there to drive the plot rather than be a real fleshed out character. She’s a photographer and her growing attraction to Tony and his stories are believable, but if the film has any real lack it’s perhaps that in its focus on Tony’s story the film isn’t really interested in her as a person beyond how she impacts Tony.

Matt Johnson has shown himself to be an astute director, with an eye to entertainment and sentiment that never rings false. It’s remarkable that he made this and had it and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie get released in the same year. His growing cult following is well-deserved, but he’s more than just an indie comedy success. Tony builds on what he did with BlackBerry, showing he’s got the chops to be the next great Canadian independent director. His Nirvanna the Band-mate, Jay McCarrol, continues their collaboration, scoring this film as he has all of Johnson’s films. The score really does a lot of work of selling the emotional layer beneath everything happening, with its ambient piano warmth. The score draws us into Tony’s mood while also setting the scene for the Provincetown scenes. It also has a great rock soundtrack, ranging from The Stooges to Kool & the Gang. Between the evocative score and the great soundtrack of mid-70s tunes, Tony sounds as good as it looks.

It’s possible that I’m over-praising the film and others may find it too modest and straightforward, but to me this is one of the most enjoyable films I’ve seen in some time and definitely among my very favourites of this year. It seems to be Matt Johnson’s year, and I for one am happy to be along for the ride.

9 out of 10

Tony (2026, USA)

Directed by Matt Johnson; written by Matt Johnson & Matthew Miller & Todd Bartels & Lou Howe based on Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain; starring Dominic Sessa, Antonio Banderas, Leo Woodall, Emelia Jones, Stavros Halkias, Rich Sommer, Dagmara Domińczyk.

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