‘Tony’ Review: A24 Sends Anthony Bourdain Back to the Kitchen Sink Where He Belongs
Long before he was carving lamb on television or trading barbs with world leaders over noodle soup, Anthony Bourdain was just a broke, aimless teenager with a chip on his shoulder and a girl he could not stop thinking about. That is the entry point Matt Johnson chooses for ‘Tony‘, a summer of 1975 snapshot that plants a nineteen year old Bourdain in Provincetown, Massachusetts, long before Kitchen Confidential made him a household name. Dominic Sessa plays him, fresh off his breakout in boarding school drama, and the film wastes no time throwing him into a restaurant kitchen alongside Antonio Banderas, Leo Woodall and Emilia Jones.
There is a version of this movie that plays it safe, leaning on nostalgia and hero worship to coast through ninety minutes of vague biographical gesturing. ‘Tony’ is not that movie, and I respect it for that even when it stumbles.
Johnson and his four credited screenwriters are far more interested in Bourdain the mess than Bourdain the myth, and the opening title card, a self flagellating quote lifted straight from his own memoir about being a spoiled and thoughtless lout, sets the tone immediately. This is a coming of age story first and a Bourdain story second, and that choice is both the film’s boldest swing and its most persistent problem. Sessa plays selfishness and charm in the same breath surprisingly well, capturing a young man who steals from his own father and chases a girl across state lines without ever tipping fully into unlikable territory.
Where the film really sings is in its texture. Cape Cod in the summer feels lived in rather than staged, all salt air, cheap beer and the low grade panic of a restaurant kitchen right before dinner service. Johnson clearly understands the sensory chaos of that world, the ticket printers, the shouted orders, the way grease and adrenaline blur together, and he stages it with more confidence and specificity than most food dramas even attempt.
The love story is where my enthusiasm cools considerably. Emilia Jones does what she can with a character written mostly as an object of pursuit rather than a person with her own interior life, and the film’s insistence on making the romance its central engine undercuts the more interesting material happening in the kitchen around it. Banderas, meanwhile, is a wonderful anchor as a gruff but generous chef figure, and I found myself wishing the film trusted his relationship with Sessa’s character more than it trusts the will they or won’t they subplot.
Structurally, ‘Tony’ moves in loose, episodic bursts rather than a tight narrative arc, which suits the memoir it borrows from but occasionally leaves individual scenes feeling like vignettes in search of a spine. It never quite decides whether it wants to be a hangout movie or a portrait of a young man on the verge of finding purpose, and that tension keeps it from fully locking into greatness even as it remains consistently entertaining. Woodall deserves specific credit as Bourdain’s kitchen partner in crime, bringing a live wire energy that makes their scenes together the film’s most purely enjoyable stretches.
What lingers after the credits roll is not the romance or even the restaurant chaos, but the sense of watching someone figure out, almost by accident, what he is actually good at. Bourdain would not become Bourdain for decades after this particular summer, and the film wisely resists the urge to wink at the audience about where this all leads. It trusts the moment it is depicting, flaws and all, and that restraint is more admirable than a dozen prestige biopics that spell everything out in bold letters.
I walked away from ‘Tony’ entertained, occasionally moved, and mildly frustrated by a script that keeps chasing a love story it never fully earns. Sessa is a genuine find, Banderas brings real warmth, and the kitchen sequences alone make this worth a ticket, even if the film never digs quite as deep into its subject as its opening quote promises. I am landing on 8 out of 10, a strong summer watch that falls just short of the classic it clearly wants to be.
How did you like 'Tony'?
Have you seen ‘Tony’ yet, and did Sessa’s performance win you over the way it did me? Drop your verdict in the comments below.
