‘Tony’ Skips the Biopic Playbook to Explore Anthony Bourdain’s Early Arrogance

Anthony Bourdain’s public legacy is already so relentlessly mythologized that another conventional biopic would feel redundant. Directed by Matt Johnson, Tony sidesteps that trap by narrowing its scope to a few months in 1981, long before the bestselling books and travel shows. The result plays less like a Wikipedia entry and more like a prickly, small-scale drama about an overconfident kid who hasn’t earned his attitude yet.

Dominic Sessa plays the 19-year-old Bourdain — called Tony only occasionally, and mostly called worse — with a vanity and recklessness that the film refuses to soften. After losing a Vassar writing fellowship he assumed was his, he impulsively follows a girl to Cape Cod, burns through his money, and ends up washing dishes for a chef played by Antonio Banderas. The screenplay treats this not as the first chapter of a saint’s life but as a series of stupid, instructive mistakes.

Where recent films about real figures have stretched toward thriller territory or focused tightly on trauma, Tony leans into a sun-bleached, Adventureland-adjacent nostalgia. The chef apprenticeship, the evasive lies about his academic status, and the slow scrape away of posturing all suggest a young man who will eventually turn professional curiosity into a worldview — but not yet. Knowledge of Bourdain’s later career adds texture without being required; the film works as a character study of unearned confidence meeting reality.

Sessa’s performance commits to the abrasiveness without begging for sympathy, and the film’s modest scale matches its subject’s unformed state. It’s a quieter, less worshipful approach to screen biography, one that shows a future icon when he was mostly just difficult.