August 24, 2026 · Watch the official trailer
It’s easy to make a biopic become a greatest hits of someone’s life. Take their highest and lowest moments, smash them all together with a catchy soundtrack and loosely interweave disjointed parts of a person’s life, and there’s a shell of a narrative full enough to take audiences along for a two-hour ride. But it’s hard to say that audiences already familiar with the subject will find much value in what ultimately becomes a visual, cinematic Wikipedia page.
And while biopics are often Oscar bait for Hollywood’s top character actors, the films they leave behind are often pushed off to the wayside. Examining a man through a single period of his life, especially in a coming-of-age, boy-becomes-man era, is perhaps the most fertile ground for intentional character development for a young performer, while also allowing audiences to actually learn something about their subject that they might not have known before.
“Tony,” a portrait of a young writer’s escape to Cape Cod in the 1970s, is not simply about how one of America’s most prominent and influential chefs got hooked on the kitchen, but genuinely and deeply examines the inner turmoil of Anthony Bourdain in his formative years that would go on to shape both the good and the bad of his inner monologue.
Filmmaker Matt Johnson takes three summers in a teenage Bourdain’s life and condenses them down into a single season that is far less about a future acclaimed chef and far more interested in a young man finding his identity in a world that seems not to care about him at all. Dominic Sessa, an actor who is exceptionally good at portraying the everyman, makes Bourdain incredibly relatable, yet a bit fractured and kind of a jerk to those around him. There’s a very considered and nuanced standoffishness mixed with naïveté in Sessa’s performance that reflects Tony’s inability to truly allow people to get close to him.
Yet Johnson and Sessa do a remarkable job of slowly unraveling his character to the point where the demonstrable personal growth that occurs over the course of the film feels earned and rewarding rather than forced and contrived. Antonio Banderas gives an understated, yet Oscar-worthy, supporting performance as the owner and chef of the seafood restaurant Tony works at. And while it would be easy to take a simple mentorship role and play it with little effect, Banderas always seeks to find the melancholy of a man whose life aspirations have somewhat passed him by and turn that into the rationale for taking Tony under his wing.
How Sessa and Banderas relate to one another over the course of the film is also a further reflection of Tony’s personal growth and plays as a wonderful contrast to the more stoic, disengaged relationship he has with his parents in limited interactions throughout the film.
Johnson shoots “Tony” with an almost vérité, documentarian style, inhabiting the world of Bourdain’s Provincetown with a fly-on-the-wall aesthetic that keeps the camera close enough to its actors that it feels like a traditional drama, but shot from such a vantage point that it places the audience in the room itself. Viewers see Tony over the shoulder of another performer or from a slightly elevated or lowered angle that alters the traditional frame of reference just enough to make audiences take notice. The sharp production design and color palettes reflect that faded, vintage 1970s cinematic film quality that grounds “Tony” within a different era.
It’s clear throughout that Johnson and Sessa have a close relationship in cultivating and crafting this particular moment in Bourdain’s life, heavily leaning on their own shared experiences to make Sessa’s Tony less mythic and more approachable, therein allowing him to be more naturally relatable to the audience along the way.
What might be the summer’s most underseen and underappreciated film, “Tony” takes the conventions of the coming-of-age film and traditional biopic and turns them at just the right angle to make a uniquely compelling, grounded drama that ardent cinephiles should seek out, whether in theaters or once it hits a streaming service.
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