Film review: Tony is a portrait of the chef as a young, messed-up man

We independently select everything we recommend. Buying through us may earn us a commission, which supports our work.

Good luck getting a sense of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain from the fictional dramatization that is Tony. You’re about as likely to watch a handful of Harry Potter movies and come away with a workable recipe for butterbeer.

But Canadian director Matt Johnson (Blackberry, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie) isn’t looking to serve up a biography of Bourdain, who died in 2018 at the age of 61.

Rather, he’s trying to capture the emotional essence of a 19-year-old chef-to-be when he was — in his own words, drawn from his 2000 memoir Kitchen Confidential — “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”

And who better to embody that lout than the lanky, gawky Dominic Sessa, who delivered a similar vibe in his breakout performance in Alexander Payne’s wonderful 2023 Christmas comedy The Holdovers?

That one was set in 1970 in a fictional New England boys school. This one opens at Vassar College, 1975, with Tony badly bullshitting his way through an interview for a writer’s scholarship. He trots out the word “Bildungsroman” but pronounces it “buildings Roman.” He doesn’t get the gig.

Undeterred — well, quite deterred but also smitten with a girl from high school — Tony heads to Provincetown in Cape Cod, Mass., where Nancy (Emilia Jones) mentioned she’d be spending the summer.

He finds work there as a plongeur in a local crab shack run by a never-named chef (Antonio Banderas). He is allowed to sleep on the man’s front-porch hammock, woken each morning by a bucket of cold water thrown over his face. And he lies (or pretends, or believes) that he’s a novelist whose day job is just material for the book he’s writing.

The result is a propulsive, no-moment-wasted storyline, as Tony runs away from his milquetoast parents and never stops. One thing leads to another so effortlessly that to remove even one page from the screenplay (co-written by Johnson) would be like skipping a course during a prix fixe; you’d be hungry for more.