For many of us, Anthony Bourdain was the thoughtful globetrotter who could talk about food as if it were an existential emergency exit. Before his early death, he filled the TV schedules with travel shows that served up the world in slow bites and left you with something to think about. Now A24 and Matt Johnson have made “Tony”, a film that homes in on one pivotal moment in his life, when a restless dreamer began to resemble the man we’d come to know.
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Disclaimer: Apropos Magazine received access or a review copy. As always, we share our own impressions — unfiltered.
Six stars
There’s a particular kind of biopic that wants to take a temperature instead of reading out an encyclopaedia entry. It has no interest in explaining an entire life. It just wants to catch the second when that life finds its direction. “Tony” is one of those films. Matt Johnson takes us to Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1975, where young Tony gets a job washing dishes at a seafood restaurant. It sounds like the start of a classic coming-of-age story, and it is. Just the grubby kind. This one smells of fish, sweat and poor judgement.
Dominic Sessa plays Tony with a charisma that borders on cheek. In the best possible way. He has the kind of presence that makes it easy to see why people are drawn to him and exhausted by him at the same time. That balance matters. Bourdain was a sharp observer with a worldview and an edge, and he could also sound like a bloke two steps ahead of his own self-awareness. Sessa catches that mix of charm, restlessness and self-deception that makes him feel human, someone you could meet outside a museum display. It’s a small but crucial distinction, and one of the film’s greatest strengths.
Leo Woodall’s Sal is the sort of person you’d rather avoid sitting next to at a party unless you’d already decided to make some terrible decisions that night. He’s cheeky, irresponsible and a little too good at making chaos look like freedom. Their friendship becomes a mirror in which Tony sees both a possible future and a warning. They’re both adrift, in different ways. Tony still has a scrap of a conscience. Sal is more like a cigarette that’s already lit before you’ve even asked for one.
Antonio Banderas is terrific as the head chef. It’s almost offensive how effortlessly he carries the part. He has the calm and authority that make you understand why Tony listens. There’s nothing gentle about the chef’s discipline. It comes from craft, pride and a kind of dignity that has no need to raise its voice. Banderas gives the film its moral weight without weighing it down. That takes skill, and it’s rarer than Hollywood likes to pretend.
At heart, “Tony” is a feel-good, feel-bad film. It wants us to feel warm and uncomfortable at the same time, and it pulls that off surprisingly well. There’s something almost modest about its ambitions. It stays the size of its story, which suits it. The moment a film about Anthony Bourdain starts passing itself off as a philosophy of life with an exceptionally good soundtrack, it risks falling a little too much in love with its own aura. Matt Johnson sidesteps that trap and sticks with the tangible, the human and the slightly messy. Thank goodness.
There are some smooth edges. The film follows a familiar formula, and you can feel that we’ve been here before with a young man just unlikeable enough to be interesting, slowly learning a thing or two about responsibility, craft and belonging. When the storytelling is this tight and the performances this precise, the familiarity is easy to forgive. Some stories are interesting because they touch on something we recognise in ourselves, even when we’d rather look away.
And that may be the film’s real point. Bourdain didn’t arrive fully formed, an icon armed with sharp lines and a worldly stare. Places, people and friction shaped him. So did a kitchen that had no time for self-deception and plenty of room for passion. “Tony” shows all that with energy and discipline, which is probably why it stays with you a little longer than you expect.
It’s also a story about how overnight success is something that happens to EuroMillions winners. The road to success can be long, instructive, full of self-deception and downright nasty. You tend to take a few knocks along the way. Bourdain certainly did.
“Tony” is a canny little biopic. There’s no grand entrance with its arms in the air. It finds its footing in the characters, the heat of the kitchen and the way a young man looks towards something he can’t yet name. In the end that may be the most Bourdain-like thing about it. The film knows a life can begin without an epiphany. Sometimes it starts with the washing-up. A little humble. A little filthy. And with a boss who sees you for who you are before you can see it yourself.
I loved this film. It put me in mind of Sessa’s other masterpiece, “The Holdovers”, which strikes some of the same notes.
See it with a glass of white wine and, if you fancy, an oyster in the other hand. In Bourdain’s spirit, and if the cinema lets you.
“Tony” opens in Danish cinemas on 5 November 2026.
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