Tony by Matt Johnson, an intelligent youthful portrait of Anthony Bourdain
- Planet Claire
- 3 minutes ago
- 7 min read
2026© article by Clara Bruno - all rights reserved
reading time: 7 minutes
Tony, directed by Matt Johnson
Film seen on 28 August 2026 at the Centrale Art House cinema in Turin, in the original American English version.
Running time: 1h 46 min.
Tony by Matt Johnson tells the story of Anthony Bourdain before he became Anthony Bourdain: the iconic chef of haute cuisine, one of the most recognisable figures in contemporary food culture, the television chef, and the author of Kitchen Confidential, the memoir that became a worldwide success. The film stops before any of this happens and does not even tell the story of his premature and tragic death in 2018. It tells, with intelligence and restraint, the story of nineteen-year-old Tony: restless, deceitful, pretentious, in what becomes a very interesting coming of age story. It is a film that stays with you, rather than disappearing into the undifferentiated mass of the many productions available today. In particular, the film’s writing is distinguished by the excellent quality of its dialogue.
The feature film has just arrived in European cinemas late August 2026, also in its original-language version. Distributed by New York-based A24, it reaches Italy thanks to the highly commendable Bologna-based I-Wonder Pictures, which brings many of the finest films currently in circulation to Italian screens.
It is 1975, the summer in which Anthony Bourdain learned how to live. The director identifies the precise moment when his life took the direction it was to take. Tony is a boy from a cultured, comfortably middle-class family (editor’s note: his mother is a copy editor in New York journalism; his father is an executive at the prestigious Columbia Records label and, as his surname suggests, has French roots, from the Atlantic region east of Bordeaux). They live in New Jersey. Anthony is at university, convinced that he is destined to become a great writer.
The film draws on the opening pages of Kitchen Confidential (published in 2000), in which Bourdain himself describes his nineteen-year-old self as a spoilt, unhappy, narcissistic and self-destructive young man in need of being ‘put in his place’.
The lead actor is Dominic Sessa: we saw him make his extraordinary debut in Alexander Payne’s comedy The Holdovers (2023), in which he plays a highly intelligent but desperately lonely and depressed student who is held over at boarding school during the Christmas holidays while everyone else goes away with their families. Here, as a very young Anthony Bourdain, he conveys similar feelings: isolation, rebellion, extraordinary personality and intellect. The actor shows us Bourdain’s still-unformed character, his brooding intelligence, arrogance, vulnerability and a particular mixture of cynicism and curiosity.
The young Bourdain aspires to a university scholarship for a writing course in New York, but the scholarship is awarded to another candidate. The disappointment leaves him without direction. He follows Nancy, his high-school crush, to Provincetown on the Cape Cod peninsula in Massachusetts, a renowned holiday resort on the East Coast between Boston and New York, where she spends the summer. British actress Emilia Jones gives the character a vitality greater than her narrative function might suggest. Tony arrives with virtually no money, a black eye and no plan. In order to stay in Provincetown, he must find a job and ends up washing dishes at the Flagship, a small seafood restaurant by the sea. Here, without him realising it, his life begins to change.
The restaurant works with a small number of dishes, fresh ingredients, technique, discipline and repetition. Tony discovers a whole new world. Antonio Banderas plays Chef, the Portuguese owner and cook of the Flagship. Stern, deeply religious, demanding and at the same time capable of surprising tenderness. Naturally Spanish, Banderas carefully constructs the figure of a capable Portuguese immigrant rooted in the Provincetown community. Chef is not a person who actually existed in Bourdain’s biography under this precise identity. The film’s dramaturgical structure construction combines several experiences and people Bourdain encountered in the world of professional kitchens. The screenwriters have transformed these various experiences into a single master figure, a kind of paternal mentor. And Banderas is magnificent. His performance avoids the cliché of the gruff chef. Chef can be intimidating, but he possesses a philosophical inner calm. His relationship with Tony is built through rituals: the abrupt awakening with a bucket of water, lessons in the kitchen, fishing, the discipline of work, silence. Banderas succeeds in transforming these gestures into a genuine pedagogy of existence. His Chef seems to be telling Tony, the aspiring writer, something very simple: before you can write about life, you have to have one.
Sal, played by Leo Woodall, represents the opposite side: chaos, challenging anarchy. A young kitchen colleague, he is charismatic, sexually uninhibited, a cocaine user, aggressive and immersed in a transgressive nightlife. The kind of person who can fascinate a boy like Tony.
The dramatic construction is perfect: Tony finds himself between two models of masculinity. Chef teaches him the value of work and self-control; Sal offers him the exhilaration of disobedience and breaking the rules. Anthony will ultimately take something from both and construct his own identity.
The cast also includes Dagmara Domińczyk and Rich Sommer as Tony’s parents, Stavros Halkias as a member of the kitchen brigade, and Monica Raymund as Mary, one of the women working at the restaurant.
Tony is a far more sophisticated feature film than its apparent simplicity might suggest. The cinematography is by Michael Bauman, who works primarily with a shallow depth of field and a warm colour palette, deliberately reminiscent of 1970s American cinema, aiming to recreate the look and texture of films shot on analogue film (although he works with digital cameras).
The insistent use of long lenses has a reason: the world around Tony often tends to dissolve into his mind, which loses contact with reality. The background is sometimes almost indistinct; the protagonist’s face, by contrast, remains sharp and dominant. It is a form of subjectivisation. The frequency of close-ups, extreme close-ups and tightly framed shots is remarkable. The face becomes a narrative field. The camera often lingers on Tony’s reaction rather than on the actions of the various characters.
There are also frequent shots that I would define as semi-subjective: not the protagonist’s actual point of view, but a position so close to him that we are forced to share his perspective, in a claustrophobic way.
Canadian director Matt Johnson has said in interviews that he did not want to present Anthony Bourdain as the fascinating and socially invincible public figure the world came to know. Instead, he chose an intimate cinematic language dominated precisely by semi-subjective shots and close-ups, capturing at close range the vulnerability and emotional hunger in his eyes. Objects are isolated too: the knife, the salt, the oysters, the food, the kitchen tools. Lead actor Dominic Sessa explains that the camera moves in on details to convey the feeling of a “trench”, of a “war”, excluding the surrounding space and concentrating on Tony’s psychological reactions.Matt Johnson presents the kitchen as a place of gruelling labour: sweat, burns, repetition, exhaustion, mistakes, hierarchies, humiliation, learning. The oyster-opening sequence is a rite of initiation. Tony learns that the kitchen is a concrete, physical, almost military practice. And despite the film being set in a spectacularly beautiful seaside location, the human face is continually preferred to the landscape.
Nancy, played by Emilia Jones, is the immediate reason Tony arrives in Provincetown. But ultimately, within the film, the girl loses her function as a romantic object: Tony realises that he cannot conquer life through seduction, lies or intellectual posturing. The screenplay has the merit of not turning Nancy into the muse who “saves” the protagonist. Tony has to save himself. An intelligent choice.
The editing also avoids the traditional biopic. It has the structure of a coming-of-age novel (Bildungsroman, the word Tony gets wrong at the beginning of the film and which his mother corrects).
KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE CINEMATIC NARRATIVE
Although inspired by Kitchen Confidential, the film is not a documentary reconstruction of the memoir. Some episodes have been invented for the cinema: the character of Chef, as I have said, is composite. In addition, the fire at the Flagship restaurant and the clambake, the charity seafood barbecue on the beach, are excellent cinematic constructions.
The conflict with his parents is made stronger in the film than it actually was: in Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain describes his parents as forming a loving middle-class family, from which he wanted to break away out of rebellious instinct. Another point: Tony was deeply in love with Nancy Putkoski, his high-school sweetheart, with whom he would eventually -although we do not see this in the film- build a lasting relationship and who would become his first wife. She had moved to Provincetown for a summer job at Spiritus Pizza, and Tony followed her because he could not bear to lose her. In Bourdain's memoir there is no invented scholarship to escape through, but simply the reckless impulsiveness of a young man who was on the verge of being expelled from the prestigious Vassar College. They married in 1985. Nancy remained by his side for thirty years. After Bourdain’s tragic death in 2018, Nancy, intensely private and far removed from the spotlight, broke her silence only to contribute to the author’s official oral biography, Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, offering an intimate portrait of the tired and fragile man he had become in his final years.
THE MUSIC
Music is one of the film’s great strengths. Acclaimed music supervisor Mandy Mamlet has created a beautiful soundtrack that recreates 1975 and accompanies Tony’s psychological transformation. Among the many songs she used, I would mention “Magic Mountain” by Eric Burdon; “Girlfriend” by the Modern Lovers, which ironically captures the energy of the affluent provincial world; “Everything Merges with the Night” by Brian Eno, which brings a sophisticated, introspective and almost suspended dimension; “Strawberry Letter 23” by the Brothers Johnson, an euphoric moment; “Hollywood Swinging” by Kool & The Gang; “Down on the Street” by the Stooges, which captures an ante litteram punk rawness; “A Fifth of Beethoven” by Walter Murphy which triumphantly accompanies the preparation of the Lobster Thermidor; “Flying” by the Faces, featuring Rod Stewart’s iconic, raspy and expressive voice, with its dreamy yet earthy atmosphere; and the 1950s classic “Old Cape Cod” by Patti Page, which conveys a vein of nostalgia.
It is a highly sophisticated selection, not a banal nostalgic 1970s playlist.
The original score by Jay McCarrol is built around a melancholic and understated piano theme.
THE FILM ENDS
The film stops when Bourdain is still very young and enters the selective culinary academy in New York City. Bringing the story to an end just as the chef’s story is beginning is a particularly respectful decision towards Bourdain, because it avoids retrospectively turning his tragic death into an obligatory interpretative key to his youth.
It is a film that avoids, with great intelligence and tact, any sensationalist approach.
By telling only a few months of Bourdain’s life, the film manages to tell us something far more interesting than a complete biography.
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