(The Vashon Island Film Festival runs August 13–16 for its fifth year. Check out Alan Motley’s Tonymovie review, fresh from the fest. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
I absolutely loved Tony, so let me just get that out of the way.
Matt Johnson has made an Anthony Bourdain movie that focuses on almost none of the Anthony Bourdain most of us came to know. There is no television, no world travel, no celebrity chef mythology and no attempt to explain the entire man. Instead, we get one summer in 1975.
For me, that is exactly why it works.
We already know Anthony Bourdain—or at least the version that eventually became public: the writer, chef, traveler, cultural observer and wonderfully mysterious personality who could walk into a place most of us had never heard of, sit down over a plate of food and somehow make us want to understand both the meal and the people around it.
Tony isn’t really about that man. It is about some of the experiences that started building him. And when you strip the story down, the beginning is remarkably simple: Guy likes a girl. Guy follows the girl for the summer. Guy gets by on a lie. Guy discovers a kitchen. Guy finds a passion.
That’s enough.
What I appreciate about Johnson’s approach is that the film doesn’t seem desperate to prove how important every moment is. It doesn’t constantly point toward the future and announce, “This is the moment Anthony Bourdain became Anthony Bourdain.” Instead, it lets those experiences breathe.
Dominic Sessa plays him not as an icon in waiting, but as a young man who hasn’t figured himself out yet. He’s awkward, reckless, occasionally unlikeable and operating with a worldview far smaller than the one Bourdain would eventually share with millions of people. That matters, because the Bourdain we came to love was someone shaped by experience. His curiosity about food eventually became curiosity about people, culture, class, politics and place. But before any of that could happen, he needed something to write about.
Tony gives us the beginning of that material.
The restaurant kitchen becomes a doorway. The chaos, personalities, pressure, camaraderie and strange little ecosystem behind the swinging doors give this aspiring writer something he didn’t have before: a world. Suddenly you can see, without the movie having to spell it out, how this summer might eventually find its way onto the pages of Kitchen Confidential.
The writing is stellar, and the pacing worked beautifully for me. The cinematography gives the film a lived-in quality that feels appropriate to the period without becoming an exercise in screaming, “Look, it’s the 1970s.” There is a confidence in allowing the camera to simply spend time with these characters rather than forcing significance into every frame.
Sessa is excellent. One of the smartest choices is that he doesn’t appear to be doing an Anthony Bourdain impersonation. He’s not performing the voice, cadence or mannerisms we recognize from television. He’s playing Tony before Tony knows how to become Bourdain.
Antonio Banderas brings a grounded maturity to the film, while the kitchen around Tony feels appropriately unruly, funny and occasionally miserable. There is an almost cozy quality to much of the movie, which might seem strange considering how complicated and edgy its subject would eventually become. I don’t see that as a problem.
Trying to make this period of his life darker, grander or more complicated simply because we know what came later would have been a mistake. We know the ending. Tony doesn’t. That distinction gives the film much of its charm.
More importantly, Tony isn’t attempting to reverse-engineer Bourdain’s entire life or explain the man through the tragedy of how it ended. It is interested in something much smaller and, I think, much more compelling: What did the world look like before his worldview became enormous?
That feels like a remarkably respectful way to approach him.
There are documentaries, interviews, books and years of television if you want more of the complete Anthony Bourdain story. Tony offers something else: a glimpse of a few essential touch points, the summer before the stories and the experiences before the worldview.
This was the itch before the formidable scratch.
Maybe that’s why I walked out without much of a critique. I didn’t need the movie to break out of its formula, cover another decade of his life or explain Bourdain to me. I just needed to understand how this young guy, chasing a girl and stumbling into a restaurant kitchen, might eventually become the man whose curiosity about food opened the rest of the world to him.
For me, it absolutely did.
What a great start to Vashon Island Film Festival 2026.
– Alan Motley (@alanmotley)
