Tony

Despite any initial reservations one may have about Tony – the biopic/prequel about how Anthony became Bourdain that sounds like a for-hire job by an emerging filmmaker – the surprise is how perfectly director Matt Johnson’s latest feature aligns with his growing filmography. Hot off the successes of his 2023 tech-based drama BlackBerry and the 2025 feature adaptation of his cult TV show Nirvanna the Band the Show, Johnson has become more noticed as an independent filmmaker with a niche following but a promising career path. The filmmaker’s swerve from a mockumentary-sitcom spinoff film to an A24-backed biopic of a celebrated chef speaks to Johnson’s ongoing transition. As his work moved beyond post-ironic guerrilla filmmaking and into more mainstream material, a quiet fear emerged that Johnson could suffer the same fate as so many other indie directors, either swallowed up by never-ending IP projects or his signature humor squashed into a stale shadow of itself. Similar ends have befallen the likes of Taika Watiti, Destin Daniel Cretton, Dean Fleischer Camp, Edgar Wright, and all the other directors whose work has been absorbed into the Disney/Marvel behemoth or neutered into underwhelming output that barely turns heads. Although Tony is Johnson’s most conventional film to date, it thankfully demonstrates that he can still provide his signature touch.

As in Johnson’s other works, the protagonist of Tony – the 19-year-old Vassar freshman Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa), cursed with a desperate ambition to be the next Great American Author – is an idiot with a dream. Planning to fake it until he makes it, Anthony (or, as he demands others refer to him in a performative show of friendliness, Tony) acts like he has something to prove. From his pitching a metatextual short story that he has no intention of writing just to win a fellowship that will take him away from his parents to then lying about getting said fellowship to flirt with fellow student Nancy (Emilia Jones), one quickly gets the impression that Tony is on a similar wavelength with Matt Johnson’s other protagonists. Sharing the same entitlement and surface-level understanding as Johnson’s fictional self in Nirvanna the Band, Tony subverts the idealized younger versions of celebrities typically presented in biopics and instead comes off as a pretentious phony. Lacking the dorky charm of Johnson’s other characters – from the pop-culture-referencing duo of Nirvanna the Band, Operation Avalanche‘s film-nerd protagonist, or even Glenn Howerton’s all-bark-and-no-bite, hockey-obsessed businessman from BlackBerry – Tony bursts out of the gate as the most unlikable Johnsonian hero. 

Impatiently skipping the craft- and career-building steps taken by other great writers, Tony spends much of the first act avoiding the necessary process of developing his skills and perspective, sidestepping the bildungsroman (or “buildings roman” as he puts it, before his mother corrects him) to quickly achieve the success he rightfully deserves. However, despite his Caulfield-level pretensions, the only redeeming quality is his youthful naïveté, the hope that maybe this kid will grow out of his arrogance. And if the viewer’s understanding of Bourdain doesn’t already give away that he puts his brashness to good use in the future, the film’s opening quote (taken from Bourdain’s memoir, Kitchen Confidential) reveals that young Tony is in for the ass-kicking of his life.

As his summer plans quickly go awry – losing the scholarship and finding out Nancy is taken after following her to Provincetown, Mass. – Tony hits the closest a middle-class 19-year-old can get to rock bottom. Hung over, robbed, and now trapped on an island he can’t pay to leave while too embarrassed to call his parents, the only thing he can do is go back to a bar he was kicked out of the night before for drunkenly hitting on a waitress and fighting the staff. Now with his tail between his legs, he has no other choice but to ask the owner for a place to stay. Thankfully, said owner, a mysterious Brazilian man only known as “Chef” (Antonio Banderas), lets him sleep in his hammock in exchange for his no-pay service as a dishwasher. Stuck spending the summer working in the back of a kitchen, his exposure to a cast of colorful characters and emerging friendship with Nancy could serve as a clichéd setup for a coming-of-age story where the young hero grows to appreciate what life can offer. Instead, Johnson plays around with this conceit.

Giving in to the larger-than-life storytelling that Bourdain was known for, Johnson applies his fine-tuned affinity for tweaking fiction, crafting a film that proves to be funnier, warmer, and more chaotic than meets the eye. Working with a crew of seedy, coke-snorting chefs, the young dishwasher gets involved in several ’70s hangout hijinks, ranging from driving around the backroads of Provincetown with older co-worker Sal (Leo Woodall) to watching him shoot up heroin. In the kitchen, as Tony is promoted to assist with preparing dishes, he is thrown into a tense workplace environment filled with trash-talking, stabbings, and fistfights. This is made all the more humorous given that this level of pressure and animosity is all for a restaurant that only serves four simple dishes. As he gets closer to Nancy – still pretending that he has that fellowship and is actively working on his book – Tony’s affection for her is complicated by her growing distrust and Sal’s thrashing of her boyfriend. In between the splashes of love and violence, however, Chef is there to provide Tony the inspiration he so desperately wants. Working alongside the older man and learning more about the culinary arts, the aspiring writer develops an interest in cooking that ends up conflicting with his literary goals. Although these plotlines are bound by the rigid structures of the subgenre, what makes Tony work is Johnson’s clear passion to make this the best version of the form.

As a genre filmmaker, Johnson has always dabbled in specific modes that he either lovingly lampoons or amplifies to a point of pure sincerity. Johnson puts in just as much effort for this coming-of-age/hangout-comedy mash-up as he did in turning the tropes of a mockumentary on its head for Nirvanna the Band, constructing his found-footage period conspiracy-thriller Operation Avalanche, and making a serious drama about a mobile device in BlackBerry. Maintaining his taste for hedonistic excess and ambiguous morality mixed with the sweetness of a slice-of-life drama, he brings out the humanity in his potentially difficult-to-like characters without turning the result into syrupy schmaltz. He exhibits a keen understanding of what makes a good biopic tick: It’s light enough to be a crowd-pleaser but with enough rough edges to give it some identity.

It’s questionable how accurate the film is vis-à-vis Bourdain’s journey, but it’s admirable how Tony doesn’t allow any romanticization of its subject. This Tony feels like an original character that Sessa gets to sink his teeth into, with the actor turning in a delightfully balanced performance of brattiness and passion that is still distinct from his similar role from The Holdovers (2023). And unlike the protagonists of Johnson’s other works, whose flaws lead to failed obscurity or Sisyphean comedy, Tony ends his first journey on a more successful note. Although it will take a while for Tony to become the type of guy that champions Palestinian cuisine or gets pretentious over a Waffle House, the young writer/cook at least learns to embrace more of what life throws at him, good and bad. He may not be perfect by the end of the film, but doesn’t that give people some hope that they could easily turn themselves around and aspire to something greater like Bourdain? It’s this strange flavor of optimism that permeates Tony, showcasing Johnson’s ability to get at the gut level of any film, a talent that may save him from the fate of other indie filmmakers before him. He’s able to see an oyster as an oyster, but also break it open and figure out its center.