Tony (2026 | USA | 106 minutes | Matt Johnson)
Tony Review
As a genre, biopics are fraught with questions and filmmaking landmines. First, the word itself: do you pronounce it the obviously correct way or go with a bafflingly wrongheaded version that rhymes with myopic? Then you’ve got the trappings of the form: a cradle-to-grave summary of a great person (usually a man, tbh) or the tight focus on that One Great Event that shaped their life? And even before you get started with writing and casting, you have to ask yourself what more can a narrative feature illuminate about a person’s life when you’ve already got the work they themselves put on tape, in print, and in interviews, alongside a perfectly reasonable documentary made by one of the best in the business a few short years ago?
Happily, with Tony, a new biopic about the celebrated (if complicated) chef, author, and travel documentary auteur Anthony Bourdain, Matt Johnson gets almost all of the answers just right. Eschewing the Walk Hard treatment and working from a screenplay from Seattleite Todd Bartels and co-writer Lou Howe, the movie considers a single summer on Cape Cod that shaped the course of Bourdain’s life and career. Starring a note-perfect Dominic Sessa in the title role, the film takes the shape of a beachfront coming-of-age (a “bildungsroman” if you must) in which our degenerate, self-delusional, wayward protagonist gets the first inclinations of figuring things out.
I’m by no means a Bourdain scholar, but with most biopics, I try to go into them pretending that the person that they’re about doesn’t actually exist. It helped me to have a more charitable take on the likes of Jeremy Allen White as the Boss or Timothée Chalamet as verge-of-electric Bob Dylan. Heck, many people made it through Hamnet oblivious to the well-telegraphed identity of Paul Mescal’s character. With Tony, I honestly believe that someone could make it through the whole movie not knowing that Anthony Bourdain was a real person who went on to have a wildly influential career and still appreciate its many melancholic charms purely on the strength of its storytelling, engaging cast, and wonderful filmmaking choices.
The film opens in 1975 with an unreasonably self-assured college kid pitching his book proposal to a buttoned-up panel of unimpressed older men. In a wood-paneled conference room, he assures them that their money would be well spent to fund his summer in NYC completing an imaginary dialogue between Orwell and Kerouac, never mind that he has yet to write a single page. Later that night, high on his certainty of spending the coming months in the big city, he sees an unrequited high school crush (Emilia Jones as Nancy) who he also (and once again) fails to impress. Importantly, though, he finds out that her plans involve slinging slices at a Provincetown pizzeria. When his grant (unsurprisingly) fails to materialize, he busts up his childhood bedroom, steals some cash from his kindly dad’s wallet, and disappears without a plan to a summer of discovery.
Coming off an astonishingly assured debut as a sad boarding school kid in The Holdovers, it’s easy to see why Sessa was cast here. Rather than reprise that role, he brings something new, deeper, and even more engaging to the college-aged Tony, balancing delusions of grandeur with a hunger for self-discovery, capturing the possibilities of unseen depth hidden behind a perpetually skeptical brow and a constant patter of self-deception. It’s a greatly nuanced performance whose magnetism endears us to this consummate liar as he inexplicably stumbles his way – through a bar fight – into a kitchen job and a beachfront summer stay. (Sure, the bed’s a hammock, there are no walls, and the daily wake-up calls are unconventional at best, but showing up late in the busy season means accepting compromise.)
Here, the soulful mentor is a down-to-business, seafood chef at an unassuming townie restaurant. Played with exceptional panache by Antonio Banderas, the character is an amalgamation of Bourdain influences who goes unnamed; impressively, though, the lack of specificity instead conveys an air of reassuring mythic status. Given the ramshackle cast of characters populating it, the kitchen mostly runs with unexpected efficiency. Amid a wrecking crew including Stavros Halkias, Michael Jibrin, and Monica Raymund, Leo Woodall — having quite the year between this and Tuner — is the messiest and most appealing of his new co-workers. As slightly older, far more deeply seasoned local Sal, he’s a chaos monster of reckless abandon, a terrible influence when it comes to substances, the best wingman in town to bring to a party, and a counterbalance devil-on-shoulder to the order imposed by Banderas.
His often drunken or pugilistic attempts to impress include clinging to the absurd delusional belief of young academic men everywhere that a woman would be more impressed by a writer than a man who knows his way around a kitchen, let alone one who can liberate a raw oyster from its shell. Emilia Jones and the script do what they can to make Tony’s love interest seem like a real person with her own ambitions, skills, and skepticism, but even though Tony’s admittedly spending the summer in pursuit of Nancy, the more potent romance is the triangle of friendship between the three men.
Matt Johnson initially seemed like a perplexing fit to steward this celebrity biopic, but it’s this deeply bromantic setup that makes the choice to have him at the helm of this enterprise make complete sense. Successfully channeling the precipitous rise and fall of a telephone company in Blackberry and charting the shackles of a decades-long creative partnership through multiple timelines in the miraculously brilliant Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, he has an impeccable familiarity with young men with self-destructive tendencies, soulful characters, and the agonies of their messy ambitions.
Johnson cultivates a cinematic flavor profile that perfectly balances light skepticism, deep feeling, and ample humor. The excellent performances and enliveningly paced storytelling are bolstered by a dreamy look and feel curated largely by Oscar-nominated cinematographer Michael Bauman (a frequent Paul Thomas Anderson collaborator) and inventively scored by Johnson’s own lifelong comedic partner Jay McCarroll. (If this doesn’t get them into the Rivoli, nothing will.) In Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (now streaming!),Johnson uses a flashback technique that re-frames and recontextualizes the whole story by re-writing what we think we know about prior scenes. He takes that idea and elevates it with a montage of the breathtaking highlights of Tony’s summer that’s narrated by a string of far more boring outright lies and obfuscations that he thinks will impress Nancy. The vast distance between the blandly boastful story he’s telling and the phenomenal life he’s unwilling to admit is a phenomenally effective sequence of small knives to the heart.
Although it occasionally treads into melodramatic circumstances to land its lessons, this is a narrow origin story of a compulsive liar who self-mythologized in real time. Even if only a fraction of this coming-of-age summer yarn is partially true, it succeeds mightily in conveying an appreciation for how and why Anthony Bourdain came to fall in love with two things that would inform the rest of his life: kitchens and, more importantly, honesty.
Tony arrives in wide release theaters on August 21st
Photo credit: Faith Potter courtesy of A24