Tony (2026)

There’s a kind of 19-year-old who turns out to matter eventually, once enough things have embarrassed him. Tony is about that summer when the process starts.

One summer. Provincetown, 1975. Tony (Dominic Sessa) is a Vassar dropout who takes a dishwashing gig at a seafood restaurant, works his way into the kitchen, starts a romance, gets introduced to drugs, and slowly starts giving a shit about other people. Johnson gives himself one summer and that’s it. This isn’t the biopic where the whole life gets compressed into two hours so every milestone lands with a swell. He’s more interested in what that summer reveals about a person than what a whole career proves about them.

Most biopics are scared of showing their subjects at their worst. The estate cooperates, the star wants a heroic arc, and you get The Theory of Everything or Bohemian Rhapsody or Tetris, all of them managing the image rather than examining the person. Tony doesn’t bother. Young Bourdain is pretentious, oblivious, the kind of 19-year-old who believes his sensibilities exempt him from common decency. It’s one of the more relatable portraits of that specific early-twenties asshole I’ve seen in a while.

The other comparison I’d put alongside it is Better Man, which rendered Robbie Williams as a CGI monkey and still found more truth in his worst moments than any authorized version would have allowed.

Tony doesn’t become a cook because of one clear turning point. He drifts toward the kitchen, toward the culture of it, the controlled chaos and the odd intimacy of people working brutal hours together.

Stavros Halkias is a lot of fun as his coworker, and Antonio Banderas brings real weight to the chef who becomes a mentor without quite meaning to.

I read Kitchen Confidential in my twenties. It changed how I thought about food and kitchens, and I don’t think I was alone in that. There’s a specific voice in that book, shockingly candid, and this film is about where that voice was in its earliest form, before anyone had reason to pay attention to it. The late start is one of the facts about Bourdain I find most consoling: 43, first book, everything that followed.

Tony sits third for me in Johnson’s work, behind Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie and BlackBerry.

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