Slate Magazine74%
The Anthony Bourdain Biopic Is a Perfect Little Movie 19%
By Dana Stevens29%
7/29/2026, 9:07:15 AM
Topics: Film Review, Biographical Film
BS Summary: This article contains 29 faulty reasoning types, including Post Hoc (False Cause), Halo Effect, and Appeal to Emotion, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 70.8% saturation with 1,041 hits. Analysis detected 3,072 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,471 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 33.3% and a BS Rank of 19% (18,173 of 22,362 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 81.30% of the article peer group.
The Canadian filmmaker Matt Johnson has been a presence on the indie scene since 2013, putting out a string of well-received low-to-mid-budget comedies without ever attaining (or, it seems, seeking) the profile of a mainstream director.
His first two features, *The Dirties* and *Operation Avalanche*, were microbudget indies filmed guerrilla-style around his native Toronto and starring or co-starring Johnson himself, a shambling presence who specializes in playing deluded dreamers. 2023’s [Blackberry](https://slate.com/podcasts/culture-gabfest/2023/05/how-the-blackberry-got-squashed-plus-the-new-series-bupkis-and-the-questions-about-shakespeares-identity-that-refuse-to-die) slyly subverted the “biopic of a startup” formula of movies like [The Social Network](https://slate.com/culture/2010/10/mark-zuckerberg-gets-portrayed-as-a-joyless-dweeb-in-the-social-network.html) and [Air](https://slate.com/culture/2023/04/air-movie-ben-affleck-matt-damon-sonny-vaccaro.html) to tell the deglamorized real-life story of the rapid rise and steep fall of the proto-smart device named in the title.
And earlier this year there was the hard-to-describe and even-harder-to-resist buddy comedy [Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie](https://slate.com/culture/2025/09/tiff-2025-comedy-nirvanna-band-show-movie-review.html), the final form of a project that began as a web series before being turned into a series for Canadian TV and finally developed for the big screen.
If any through line has tied together Johnson’s projects to date, it’s the writer-director’s nimbleness at remixing familiar genre elements in fresh ways.
His comic tone tends toward the satirical, but it’s a gentle kind of satire, with one eye always trained on the human drama beneath the antic proceedings.
Johnson’s latest film, *Tony*, has him working for the first time in a more conventional genre mode: It’s a coming-of-age biopic, the origin story of a famous figure whose life seems rich enough to contain several more movies within it.
*Tony*, loosely based on the early chapters of Anthony Bourdain’s bestselling 2000 memoir [Kitchen Confidential](https://slate.com/culture/2018/06/anthony-bourdains-kitchen-confidential-showed-it-was-never-too-late-for-a-second-act.html), portrays one formative summer in the life of the 19-year-old celebrity-chef-to-be.
This is the first Matt Johnson film in which the director does not appear as an actor, though he still co-produced the movie and co-wrote the script, in collaboration with Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels, and Lou Howe.
After Dominic Sessa (Paul Giamatti’s memorable teenage foil in Alexander Payne’s [The Holdovers](https://slate.com/culture/2023/11/holdovers-alexander-payne-paul-giamatti-review.html)) was cast as the young Bourdain, Sessa and Johnson embarked on another round of rewrites, hammering out changes to the screenplay as they tried to adapt the book’s quick sketch of the teenage Bourdain into a character substantial enough to have a movie-length arc of his own.
In a phrase from early in the book that’s quoted in the movie’s epigraph, Bourdain describes his college-dropout self as “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.”
Johnson has said that the movie is intended to be that ass-kicking.
The boy we meet in *Tony*’s opening scenes fits Bourdain’s self-description to a T, while remaining so evidently lost and vulnerable that we can’t help but root for him to find a way out of the dark place where he’s landed.
Tony’s depression, dissatisfaction, and restlessness don’t seem to spring from any direct cause we’re shown in the movie.
His parents (Dagmara Domińczyk and Rich Sommer) seem stable and loving enough, even if his brainy mom is a little judgy of her son’s inability to pronounce *bildungsroman* with the proper German flair.
When Tony, back in suburban New Jersey after his second year at Vassar, fails to win a writing fellowship he’d been counting on, he simply lies to his family that he did win the prize, steals the contents of his father’s wallet, and takes off for Provincetown, Massachusetts.
He chooses that destination on a whim, solely because Nancy (Emilia Jones), the classmate on whom Tony has an unrequited crush, has mentioned that she’s working there for the summer.
The real-life Bourdain had at least marginally better planning skills than his cinematic double.
As he tells it in *Kitchen Confidential*, his first summer in the Cape Cod beach town involved renting a shared house with friends.
But within hours of arrival, movie Anthony has 1) learned that the object of his longing already has a boyfriend, 2) gotten drunk, 3) been kicked out of a restaurant for hitting on a waitress, and 4) wound up passed out on the sidewalk outside said restaurant, where he is promptly robbed of all his cash.
The proprietor of the place, Ciro (Antonio Banderas), takes pity on the feckless youth and lets him spend the night in the hammock outside his beachside cottage.
The next morning, Ciro wakes Tony up with a bucket of seawater to the face, informing him that if he can show up every morning on time, he can have a job washing dishes at the Flagship, an old-fashioned seafood joint on the town’s main tourist strip.
For the sake of narrative compression, the three summers Bourdain spent working in Provincetown kitchens have been turned into a single season at one restaurant.
The kitchen staff, too, is reduced from the book’s sprawling cast of louche, swaggering knife-slingers down to a few key players.
There’s Stavros (the comedian Stavros Halkias), a witheringly sarcastic line cook who immediately sees through Tony’s false claims of restaurant experience; Tyrone (Michael Jibrin), a stoic chef whose burned and scarred hands require no oven mitt to handle red-hot cookware; and Sal (Leo Woodall), a prep cook with a hair-trigger temper who becomes Tony’s mentor in the after-hours world of Provincetown debauchery.
Together the two go on drunken joyrides, attempt to pick up women—an effort at which only Sal finds success—and smoke, snort, or, in Sal’s case, inject whatever illegal substances come their way.
A montage of Tony and Sal’s exploits, which are not just self- but other-destructive, gives the audience a vicarious adrenaline rush, even as we worry for these young men’s physical and mental safety—a concern that proves justified, as first Sal and then Tony face the harsh consequences of their antisocial behavior.
The movie’s central relationship turns out to be the one between Tony and the circumspect restaurateur Ciro, who lets the kid extend his stay on his porch for the remainder of the summer and gradually begins to trust him with more of the work in the Flagship kitchen.
It’s the chemistry between Banderas and Sessa that makes this gentle, low-stakes story—a summer movie in which, for a refreshing change, no one is murdered or menaced by a supernatural threat—simmer along like a cauldron of chowder.
Ciro’s quiet dedication to his profession, even at a joint where the menu seldom goes beyond fried fish and oysters on the half shell, slowly breaks down the brittle shell of Tony’s adolescent nihilism.
Banderas’ performance is a quiet miracle; we learn virtually nothing about his character’s past until two-thirds of the way into the movie, and even then get only a glimpse into his backstory.
But Banderas shows us by example what Ciro’s core values are, and they’re the same ones that will motivate the adult Bourdain: curiosity, hospitality, and an insatiable appetite for food, drink, and good companionship.
A late plot development involving the fate of Ciro’s restaurant feels a bit like a contrivance invented to give the final act a jolt of suspense.
But it’s hard to hold a grudge against this lovely, lyrical small movie, which may break no new cinematic ground but which also gets almost every detail right.
The lush cinematography (by Michael Bauman, who also shot Paul Thomas Anderson’s [One Battle After Another](https://slate.com/culture/2025/09/one-battle-after-another-leonardo-dicaprio-sean-penn.html)) beautifully evokes the atmosphere of P-town’s bohemian beach-bum culture in the summer of 1975.
The moody piano score is by Jay McCarrol, the Canadian musician, composer, and actor whom Matt Johnson fans will recognize as the director’s longtime close friend and collaborator on both sides of the camera.
The vintage needle drops, too, are as choice as they come, including the Brothers Johnson’s “Strawberry Letter 23” and an especially well-placed usage of Walter Murphy and the Big Apple Band’s disco rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
Eight years after his still-shocking death by his own hand, Anthony Bourdain remains a cult figure whose work remains as beloved as his final act was tragic.
This sets the bar near impossibly high for any actor attempting to play him, but the 23-year-old Dominic Sessa rises to that challenge with a performance of brilliant understatement and slow-burning charisma.
It’s easy to forget, watching this bright but troubled young man struggle to find his place in the world, that he will grow up to be a figure so many people looked to for guidance on how to forge their own paths.
Even if *Tony* were not a biopic at all, but simply the fictional story of one screwed-up kid’s transformative summer working in a restaurant kitchen, it would be a movie worth watching.
But in the closing scene, when the slightly older and wiser protagonist introduces himself to an esteemed chef (played by real-life Bourdain buddy Eric Ripert) using his full name, there’s a shiver of recognition as we remember who it was he was becoming all along.
Analysis
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