‘Tony’ Review: Dominic Sessa Finds the Restless Young Man Behind Anthony Bourdain

Matt Johnson’s Tony avoids the conventional biopic route, choosing instead to focus on a brief but formative period in Anthony Bourdain’s life. Anchored by a sharply observed performance from Dominic Sessa, the film explores the uncertain years before the future chef, author and television icon understood who he was becoming.

Anthony Bourdain built much of his extraordinary career around looking beyond the surface.

Whether he was travelling to places overlooked by conventional tourism, sitting down with people who rarely occupied the centre of popular narratives or finding meaning in food others might have dismissed, Bourdain possessed a rare curiosity about the world around him.

Matt Johnson’s Tony takes a similarly unconventional approach to telling his story.

Rather than beginning with the Anthony Bourdain most audiences remember—the sharp-tongued writer, globe-trotting television personality and cultural figure with an unmistakable screen presence—the film looks back to a time when he was still deeply uncertain about himself.

In Tony, inspired by the early chapters of Bourdain’s memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, the future culinary icon is not yet the man audiences came to know.

He is 19 years old, restless, arrogant, directionless and convinced that intelligence alone is enough to carry him through life.

That makes the film less concerned with celebrating a finished legend and more interested in understanding the person he was before he became one.

A Biopic That Chooses One Defining Chapter

Johnson could easily have followed the traditional blueprint of a celebrity biopic.

Anthony Bourdain’s life contains many chapters that would seem almost designed for the screen: the difficult early years, his experiences in professional kitchens, the literary success of Kitchen Confidential, his transformation into a global television personality and the enormous cultural impact of his work.

Instead, Tony reportedly narrows its focus to a much smaller period.

The film centres on one summer in 1975, when the young Bourdain is still trying to find direction.

After failing to secure a writing fellowship at Vassar that he desperately wanted, Tony chooses not to tell his parents the truth. Instead, he lies about having received it.

The decision becomes the starting point for a summer of uncertainty.

Tony follows Nancy, played by Emilia Jones, an old crush who has become an important figure in his imagination, to Provincetown, Massachusetts. Whether he is genuinely pursuing her or simply searching for an excuse to escape his own lack of direction is part of what makes the young character so interesting.

But the plan quickly falls apart.

His money begins to disappear, his ambitions fail to translate into anything concrete and life refuses to cooperate with the story he has created for himself.

Eventually, a chance encounter leads him to a job washing dishes at a seafood restaurant.

That kitchen becomes the unlikely setting for one of the most important transformations of his young life.

Dominic Sessa Avoids an Impression of Bourdain

One of the film’s greatest challenges is also one of its most interesting creative opportunities.

Anthony Bourdain is an instantly recognisable figure. His voice, mannerisms, writing style and public persona remain deeply familiar to millions of people.

Trying to imitate the adult Bourdain too closely would have been an obvious mistake.

Dominic Sessa, coming off his breakout performance in The Holdovers, reportedly takes a different path.

Rather than attempting to reproduce the Anthony Bourdain audiences already know, Sessa plays Tony as someone who has not yet become that person.

The young man at the centre of the story is intelligent but immature. He has literary ambitions but lacks discipline. He is self-assured on the surface while appearing deeply uncertain underneath.

Tony often behaves as though being clever is the same as having accomplished something.

That distinction becomes central to his journey.

He is convinced that he sees the world more clearly than those around him, yet he repeatedly demonstrates how little he understands about work, responsibility and himself.

Sessa captures the contradictions of a young person caught between adolescence and adulthood.

Tony lies easily. He makes poor decisions. He hides behind references and intellectual confidence when confronted by his own insecurity.

The performance works because it does not demand that audiences immediately admire the character.

Instead, it asks them to understand him.

Antonio Banderas Brings Weight to the Kitchen

If Sessa represents a young man still trying to discover his identity, Antonio Banderas provides the film with much of its emotional and dramatic gravity.

His character, Chef, is not presented as the familiar cinematic mentor who appears at the right moment with a carefully prepared life lesson.

He is demanding. He can be intimidating and unpredictable. His world operates according to standards that Tony is not yet prepared to meet.

Yet beneath the tough exterior is a sense of generosity.

Chef appears to recognise something in Tony before Tony fully understands what he is capable of becoming.

The relationship between the two characters is therefore less about sentimental guidance and more about exposure to discipline.

Tony enters the kitchen as a dishwasher, positioned near the bottom of a strict hierarchy. He is suddenly part of an environment in which intelligence and attitude mean very little unless they are supported by hard work.

The kitchen does not care about his excuses.

It requires him to show up, learn quickly and earn his place.

That may be the most important education Tony receives during the film.

The Kitchen as a Classroom

The kitchen in Tony functions as much more than a workplace.

It becomes a classroom.

The young Bourdain arrives with dreams of becoming a writer. Yet the environment that begins to shape his identity is not a lecture hall or literary institution.

It is a chaotic professional kitchen.

There, Tony encounters a world governed by hierarchy, pressure, discipline and personality.

His colleagues become part of that education.

Among them is Sal, played by Leo Woodall, a charismatic figure who represents a very different kind of masculinity and confidence.

Sal has swagger, attention and access to the more reckless temptations surrounding Tony.

Drugs, women and bravado offer one possible route for the young man trying to determine who he wants to become.

But the film suggests that Tony is searching for something more complicated.

He does not simply want to become popular.

He wants to become someone.

That distinction matters.

More Than a Story About Discovering Food

At first glance, Tony might seem like the story of how Anthony Bourdain discovered his passion for cooking.

But the film’s deeper interest appears to lie elsewhere.

The kitchen does not simply teach Tony how to prepare food.

It teaches him how to observe.

For someone who believes he is destined to become a writer, this may be the most important lesson of all.

A writer does not simply need ideas. A writer needs to pay attention.

The young Tony begins to encounter people whose lives, ambitions, failures and contradictions are more complicated than the intellectual categories he has built for himself.

In the kitchen, he learns about the rhythms of work and the personalities of the people who do it.

He begins to understand the stories that exist behind ordinary lives.

There is an irony at the heart of this transformation.

Tony believes that his future lies primarily in literature, but it is the kitchen that begins to provide him with the experiences and people that will eventually enrich his voice as a writer.

The food matters.

But the people around the food matter even more.

That idea would later become central to the public identity of Anthony Bourdain.

A Story About Growing Up

What makes Tony more interesting than a conventional celebrity origin story is its willingness to allow its central character to be difficult.

The young Tony is not a polished hero waiting for his inevitable moment of greatness.

He is often unpleasant.

He is selfish. He lies. He makes reckless choices and struggles to accept the responsibilities of adulthood.

The film reportedly resists the temptation to make every scene point neatly toward the famous person he will eventually become.

Instead, it stays with the uncertainty.

This is a story about a young man who has not yet figured out what adulthood requires of him.

He may be intelligent, but intelligence is not maturity.

He may have ambition, but ambition is not achievement.

And he may have a dream of becoming a writer, but a dream alone does not create a life.

The lessons he learns over the course of one summer appear to have less to do with immediate success than with the gradual development of discipline and self-awareness.

Why the Smaller Story Matters

Biopics often struggle because audiences already know where the story is going.

The challenge becomes finding a reason to watch beyond simply observing famous events being recreated.

By narrowing its focus, Tony appears to avoid that problem.

Johnson is not trying to explain every stage of Anthony Bourdain’s life.

Instead, he is examining a period when nothing seemed certain.

That uncertainty gives the film its dramatic energy.

The audience may know what the young man will eventually become, but Tony does not.

And that gap between the person audiences remember and the confused 19-year-old on screen is where the film finds its most interesting material.

Dominic Sessa’s performance reportedly succeeds because he understands that the role is not about playing a legend.

It is about playing a young person before the legend existed.

The Verdict: A Portrait of the Person Before the Icon

Tony approaches Anthony Bourdain from an unexpected direction.

Instead of presenting the finished public figure, it examines the rougher, more uncertain person who existed before the fame, the books and the television career.

Matt Johnson’s decision to focus on one formative summer allows the film to explore something that a traditional cradle-to-grave biopic might have overlooked: the value of not yet knowing who you are.

Dominic Sessa brings energy and vulnerability to a character who is often difficult to like but consistently compelling to watch.

Antonio Banderas, meanwhile, gives the story much of its weight, portraying a mentor figure who teaches through expectation rather than easy inspiration.

The kitchen becomes the centre of the story, but the film is ultimately about something larger than food.

It is about discipline.

It is about work.

It is about learning to pay attention.

And perhaps most importantly, it is about the long and uncertain process of becoming a person capable of telling other people’s stories.

There is a fitting connection between the young man portrayed in Tony and the Anthony Bourdain the world eventually came to know.

Before he could spend his career travelling the world and listening to people whose stories were rarely given centre stage, he first had to learn how to look beyond himself.

That may be the most important journey in Tony—not the making of a celebrity, but the slow emergence of a young man beginning to understand the world beyond his own ambitions.