☆☆☆☆☆
An unusually strong year for movies continues with Tony, a highly fictionalized account of Anthony Bourdain's formative years before he dropped out of Vassar to attend the Culinary Institute of America. Tony could easily have turned into hagiography or, worse, perhaps, into a boring recitation of facts, but instead manages to become one of the most surprising and best movies of 2026.
Tony begins with a telling quote from Bourdain's own Kitchen Confidential: "I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking."
The promise of that title card may seem a big promise to fulfill, and a challenging one. The movie, directed by Matt Johnson, rises to that challenge by presenting us with teenaged Tony Bourdain played by Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) as every bit as narcissistic and thoughtless as the real Bourdain suggested.
He's remarkably confident, as maybe a lot of intelligent 19-year-olds are, and despite all evidence to the contrary, he is certain he is going to be the recipient of a novel-writing fellowship. When he doesn't, he steals from his parents and runs off to Provincetown, where he plans to find and woo a girl who wants nothing to do with him.
But crude, loud-mouthed Tony doesn't get much of a welcome in Cape Cod, and it's not long before he's sporting a black eye, broke and stuck. It's here that the unexpected theme of Tony kicks in, and it's got nothing to do with believing in yourself, or making your own way, or having courage — there's something deeper and richer at play.
On one level, Tony watches a young man discover who he is going to become, through a series of incidents that seems both natural and implausible — much like life is for many of us. Tony winds up a dishwasher in a local seafood joint that most people write off as a kind of fast food. It's run by a chef (Antonio Banderas), who would not like Tony much if he thought about him at all, which he doesn't. One of Tony's co-workers is Sal (Leo Woodall), who's no good for anyone, but he's magnetic and cheerful and impossible to resist. And slowly, that girl, Nancy (Emilia Jones) takes notice of Tony.
Little by little, life begins to happen to Tony, and the movie embraces — openly and sweetly — its central thesis: that "providence" is real, that if you look closely, what's happening to you isn't just what's happening to you, but is your life taking shape.
As someone who has never seen an episode of Bourdain's shows or read Kitchen Confidential, I walked into Tony with no awareness at all of its subject, intrigued only by a confident trailer. Though it could so easily have been, this isn't a move made only for Bourdain's fans. It is, in the best possible way, the "buildings-roman," as over-confident Tony repeatedly mispronounces bildungsroman. It's a coming-of-age story that happens to be about someone who became famous and wealthy — but the film, to its credit, never once mentions that.
It succeeds on the strength of its four remarkable central performances — Sessa, Woodall, Jones and Banderas, each of whom creates a rich and vibrant character, the kind of people you can imagine having full and interesting lives when they aren't on camera. Director Johnson, working from a screenplay he wrote with Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, finds real joy in his storytelling, even in its darker moments.
In Tony, he's taken the ingredients of a movie that could have been obvious, rote and endlessly reverential to its subject and instead created a rich and varied repast that's unexpectedly warm, satisfying and nourishing.
Viewed August 29, 2026 — AMC Topanga
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