Matt Johnson (2026)
Until the last few seconds of the Tony trailer, I didn’t realise its title character was Anthony Bourdain. Then again, until I saw Matt Johnson’s film, all I knew about Bourdain was that he was a celebrity American chef, author of the best-selling memoir Kitchen Confidential, and committed suicide (in 2018). Set in 1975 when he was nineteen, Tony is a rather unusual film. Matt Johnson, who is Canadian, and his co-writers (Todd Bartels, Lou Howe and Matthew Miller) have based their screenplay – how faithfully I can’t say – on Kitchen Confidential’s account of how Bourdain came to abandon English studies at Vassar College and enrolled instead at the Culinary Institute of America in New York City. Although it’s no surprise the film has been labelled a coming-of-age story, that label comes with certain formula expectations, including a feelgood ending, which Tony doesn’t satisfy. I guess knowing how Anthony Bourdain’s life ended may cast a shadow over proceedings, but that doesn’t fully explain why this interesting piece of screen biography leaves you dispirited.
The film begins with Tony (Dominic Sessa) pitching a very fancy proposal to the selection committee for a Vassar writing fellowship. He also has a ‘coming-of-age story’ in mind but this one will be a ‘metaphorical conversation’ between George Orwell and Jack Kerouac, as if (Tony says) Down and Out in Paris and London were being typed, On the Road-style, onto one continuous scroll of paper. When the committee chair informs ‘Anthony’ that he’ll hear the outcome of his application shortly, confident, not to say cocky, Tony corrects him, explaining that ‘My mother is the only person who calls me Anthony’. His jolly, supportive father (Rich Sommer) meets Tony and drives him home to New Jersey. The next scene is a family meal – Tony, his parents and his younger brother (Liam Fitch). Tony tells them the fellowship is in the bag, although his mother Gladys (Dagmara Domińczyk) is, as Tony predicted to his father, coolly unimpressed. He now describes his project as a Bildungsroman, to be more specific as a ‘buildings roman’: Gladys, after correcting his pronunciation, adds with a scornful little smile, ‘I hope you didn’t write that on your application form’. Later that evening, there’s a phone call for Tony. The chair of the Vassar selectors informs him the writing fellowship has been awarded to another student. His mother does indeed address her elder son as Anthony – in that, at least, he was telling the Vassar committee the truth. One of the film’s most striking features, though, is for how long and to whom Tony carries on lying that he’s won the fellowship.
He keeps the shameful truth a secret from his family, for a start, and travels to Provincetown, Massachusetts, because he knows that Nancy Putkoski (Emilia Jones), also at Vassar and who Tony’s been keen on since they were in high school, will be working there during the summer – it turns out in a pizzeria, where she’s dating one of the delivery guys. Tony drowns his sorrows in the bar of The Flagship, a fast-food – fast seafood – eatery, drunkenly hits on the bartender, Mary (Monica Raymund), and gets himself thrown out by Sal (Leo Woodall), who works in the Flagship’s kitchen. While Tony’s out cold in the street, Sal takes his wallet, leaving Tony unable to afford even a ticket for the ferry back to New Jersey. It’s at this point he bumps into Nancy and tells her he’s in Provincetown as part of the research he’s doing for the fellowship. When one of Nancy’s friends, also on a summer job there, says that she knows the girl who did get the fellowship, Tony claims the committee decided to make two awards. In desperate need of funds, he returns to The Flagship, and begs the owner and head chef (Antonio Banderas) for a job. Chef hires him to wash dishes, though Tony claims prior experience of restaurant work and that he can cook. When Sal, Stavros (Stavros Halkias) and others in the kitchen laugh, Tony informs them he’s really a writer. That more than keeps up the laughter.
The pot-washer does have experience of eating good food, not least on family holidays to his father’s native France; Tony and his employer soon intuit there’s more to each other than meets the eye. The latter – a mystery man, known to everyone only as Chef – takes a strict but essentially kindly interest in Tony. With nowhere else to stay, Tony sleeps in a hammock on the porch outside Chef’s Cape Cod home. Each morning, Chef wakes Tony by dousing him in seawater, to ensure that he gets to The Flagship on time. Anyone late for work in the kitchen is liable to be fired, as Sal, whose heroin habit gets the better of him, discovers – he seals his fate by punching Chef rather than accepting a reprimand. Tony replaces Sal and gets his chef whites. He’s intrigued to watch Chef preparing food, even if it is mostly crab cakes or fish and chips. Tony then discovers that Escoffier’s Le guide culinaire has pride of place on Chef’s bookshelves. It turns out he graduated from the Culinary Institute of America before working in restaurants in Paris and other European capitals.
Chef’s a strict disciplinarian in several ways. This stickler for punctuality is also a practising Catholic, who won’t allow profanities in the kitchen – at least when he’s within earshot. He sees promise in his new recruit, but Tony’s prideful untruths continue to dictate the narrative, and just about ruin everything. Even as he and Nancy become closer, he keeps up the fellowship research story and, once she knows he’s working in a kitchen, insists The Flagship is a gourmet restaurant. To make good on that lie, he persuades Chef to introduce a Friday special dish: when Nancy and her friends come to the restaurant, lobster thermidor is on the menu. Things are going well until a grease fire starts in the kitchen, which inexperienced Tony tries to extinguish with water. Once the resulting blaze is finally under control, Tony and Nancy go back to her room. When she undresses, he decides the time is right to reveal all about the fellowship; Nancy feels humiliated and is infuriated. Extensive fire damage forces Chef to close the restaurant. When he tells Tony he’d been on the point of offering a full-time job there, Tony almost laughs in Chef’s face. Why on earth would he, a writer, want to spend his life in a kitchen?
On the screen at the very start is a quote from Anthony Bourdain – a retrospective self-description : ‘I was – to be frank – a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.’ There are plenty of funny bits in the film that follows (like the Culinary Institute of America’s initials, making for a good crossed-wires moment when Chef first tells Tony of his CIA involvement). But Tony succeeds in justifying Bourdain’s self-criticism to the extent of making it hard for the protagonist to redeem himself in the audience’s eyes. Things go from bad to worse when Tony meets up again with Sal after the fire and suggests they break into Chef’s home while he’s away and steal cash, so that Tony can get back to New Jersey and Sal can buy drugs. Next, they organise a clam bake on the beach: they hand out flyers, promoting the event as a fund-raiser for The Flagship but intending to pocket the admission money. Hundreds of people turn up, including Nancy and Chef. It’s certainly a relief when Tony has second thoughts; the clam bake, in the event, really does raise money for restaurant repairs. But he reconciles with Nancy and Chef, and parts company with Sal, a bit too easily.
Dominic Sessa, who made his debut in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (2023), isn’t a particularly varied or enjoyable actor to watch (or isn’t yet – he’s still only twenty-three). But his portrait of Tony is clearly thought out and consistent. Sessa conveys a definite, coherent personality, even if it’s not a likeable one – he’s a big part of what makes Tony distinctive and absorbing. It’s fortunate, even so, that the main supporting cast has charm to spare. Antonio Banderas uses his star quality and natural warmth to make Chef both charismatic and human. Emilia Jones is emotionally fine-tuned and very likeable as Nancy. Leo Woodall gives bad-boy Sal more facets than the script does. Stavros Halkias is funny as his namesake in the kitchen.
Despite his sure comic touch, Matt Johnson does rather too well in accentuating the negative. In terms of what happens, the film’s closing scenes are upbeat. Chef reopens The Flagship. Johnson follows Tony’s short-lived return to Vassar with his interview at the Culinary Institute of America, armed with Chef’s letter of recommendation (including his real name, José Vatel, and his CIA credentials). This time Tony doesn’t shoot his interviewers a line, and the rest is history: closing text confirms that Bourdain graduated from the Institute in 1978 before embarking on his hugely successful career. Yet the finale’s tone stays downbeat. On the Vassar campus at Poughkeepsie, Nancy stands on one side of the frame, with a group of friends, and Tony on the other. You’d never guess from this never-the-twain shot that he and she became husband and wife (for twenty years before they divorced in 2005).
Because Chef’s letter refers to Tony by his kitchen nickname of Flaco (Spanish for skinny), the puzzled chair of the interview panel asks the candidate to confirm his name. Tony‘s closing line, delivered by Dominic Sessa, is ‘Anthony Bourdain’. In the context of the film, this inevitably calls to mind the woman who insisted he was Anthony. It seems to be the conventional wisdom (or so a quick Google search suggests) that the life and career of Anthony Bourdain were deeply influenced, for better or worse, by his mother. Gladys Sacksman Bourdain, who worked for many years as a staff editor on the New York Times, died in 2020. This is probably just as well for the makers of this film because Dagmara Domińczyk, in her very few minutes on screen, delivers a chilling portrait of a merciless high achiever. That dinner-table scene leaves a lasting impression in Tony – as well as on Tony.
8 September 2026
