Tony

My favorite type of biopic is the kind that focuses on one chapter of the subject's life and fictionalizes the events in such a way that feels truthful, rather than attempting to be factually accurate. So I was hoping I might enjoy this snapshot of celebrity chef, author, and travel documentarian Anthony Bourdain's early years working in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Knowing little about Bourdain, but well aware of how beloved a personality he was, I looked forward to irreverent Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson's dramatization of early stories from Bourdain's 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential. Johnson is best known for irreverent docufiction like the found-footage pictures The Dirties and Operation Avalanche, the low-budget comedy Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, and the hilarious product-biopic BlackBerry, which was one of my top-5 films of 2023.

Unfortunately, Tony is a dull slog of a movie, bereft of any of the surprise and wit of the earlier films by Johnson and his frequent screenwriting partner Matthew Miller. It's a by-the-numbers docudrama that omits several key numbers that often make movies of this ilk entertaining. Dominic Sessa, who played the kid in Alexander Payne and David Hemingson's delightful 2023 holiday comedy The Holdovers, plays another sullen '70s student in 19-year-old Anthony "Tony" Bourdain. The directionless wannabe writer impulsively follows his high school crush, Nancy Putkoski, to Provincetown, Massachusetts, for the summer of 1975. With no plan of what to do when he gets there, Tony stumbles into a job as a dishwasher at a local seafood restaurant run by a once-great chef named José Vatel. The experience is life-altering for the impressionable young man who would grow up to become one of the most famous chefs of all time.

But the Tony we follow in this story is an unpleasant and uninteresting protagonist who would be completely unworthy of having a movie centered on him were it not for the fact that we know he'll become something else long after the credits roll. Nothing we see in this bland film gives us even a hint of what he might later become, and everything we watch him do in the moment just makes him seem like a loser. As the mentor chef, Antonio Banderas doesn't create the kind of memorable character we go to a formulaic biopic like this for. Apart from the ritual of waking the drunken Bourdain, who has no money for lodging so sleeps on a hammock on the chef's porch, every morning by dumping cold seawater on him, there is nothing memorable about this guy. He's pretty nice. But that's about it. Call me crazy, but in a movie with this type of dynamic, especially one that isn't concerned with sticking to the hard and fast biographical facts, I like to see a little comedy or drama between the mentor and mentee. Ya know, like what Sessa and Paul Giamatti had in The Holdovers. Not every film about a mentor needs to be Whiplash, but the mentor figure can't be as passive as this guy.

As the love interest, CODA's Emilia Jones succeeds in looking great and conveying some kind of interiority with the silent looks she gives as she observes Tony's uninspired slacker behavior, but there's really no character here. I know Tony is a 1970s period piece, but I'm still kinda flabbergasted that a movie in 2026 came out with the only female lead being this dimensionless. Nothing we see about these two people gives me any inclination that Nancy Putkoski would give Tony Bourdain the time of day, let alone fall for him as we're led to believe.

The one character and performance that stands out is Tony's more experienced friend Sal, whom he meets working in the kitchen, played by the excellent Leo Woodall, the star of this year's Tuner. The brash, cocky Sal, who has clearly been working in divy restaurants and bedding attractive female summer staff for years, takes Tony under his wing to show him the ropes. There is an authenticity to the way Sal is written and performed that anyone who's worked a summer job in Cape Cod, or any seasonal tourist area for that matter, will recognize. With the protagonist being such an empty sack of potatoes, I found myself wishing I was watching a movie called Sal rather than one called Tony; that film might have some genuinely complex emotions to connect with beyond generic dickhead aimlessness.