published August 2, 2026
This undercooked tale of a self-made asshole is missing some key ingredients needed for a well-done movie.
The biggest surprise in Tony is how insufferable he was back in his college days. “He” is Tony Bourdain. Only his mom calls him Anthony and he hates it. So. Please. Call him Tony.
Pay heed to the opening title card: “I was – to be frank – a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” It’s a quote from Anthony Bourdain’s seminal book, Kitchen Confidential.
That book is dedicated to Nancy, his college infatuation and future wife (and eventual ex-wife), and that’s where this movie begins. With this punk, Tony, trying to get a date with Nancy.
Therein is also almost the entirety of this movie’s relationship with reality.
According to this movie, in 1975, Tony’s modus operandi is lies, lies and more damn lies, all supported with the self-confidence of an egotist hiding inside a loser. He’s quite a guy, that Bourdain, as he bluffs his way through a Vassar fellowship interview; he proposes writing a book that – buried under all his pretentious jibber-jabber – is a classic “coming of age” story. His inspirations include George Orwell, Jack Kerouac and J.D. Salinger. (By the way, it’s not that this writer-to-be is happy to see you. Those are nunchakus in his pants.)
He’s turned down by the fellowship committee.
No surprise.
Which means he simply needs to tell family and friends he won the fellowship and fake it all up, as it were. And, with that, impress Nancy.
When Nancy informs Tony she’s going to Provincetown, Mass., for the summer, he continues his tasteless scheming and says he’s being holed up on Cape Cod so he can work on his book with top-shelf instructors. He’s not stalking following her. Oh heck no. (But he is. In this Bourdain multiverse, the romantic devil hunts her down by showing random people her high school photo, torn out of a yearbook.)
For those who never fell under Anthony Bourdain’s spell, Tony will likely prove to be a challenging movie. It’s virtually a pre-requisite to appreciate the man he would eventually become, not the man portrayed here. There are his books (Kitchen Confidential, Medium Raw, The Nasty Bits) and his TV shows (Cook’s Tour, No Reservations, Parts Unknown); he was at the forefront of the celebrity chef culture that dominates so much programming today, before Bobby Flay, Guy Fierie, Gordon Ramsay and the like. But, along the way, he grew up – as so many memorials attest – and became quite a globetrotting champion of diverse cultures and underserved peoples.
Yes. That’s Bourdain’s legacy. In 2018, while in France working on Parts Unknown, he hanged himself.
The challenge is the movie focuses on the summer of 1975, when Bourdain was that kid in serious need of a butt kick. Narratively, that certainly presents all sorts of possibilities.
However, the problem is how deceptively screenwriter/director Matt Johnson and co-writers Todd Bartel and Lou Howe manipulate the material to fit a Hollywood drama when the actual drama would likely have been more interesting.
All their artifice is doled out so thick it’s enough to choke on – even for people with only the most casual awareness of Anthony Bourdain.
Tony ’s problems go past any shield of artistic license. As the old saying goes, it’s easy to spot when Tony’s lying. It’s when his lips are moving. But the movie itself has the same problem. It’s easy to tell when the movie’s straying from the truth. It’s when the projector is running.
It’s a great cast, but don’t expect any Oscar nominations here.
As good as Antonio Banderas is as a P-town restaurant owner unimaginatively given only the name “Chef,” he’s stuck in the proverbial kitchen with too many other chefs. The kitchen is full of teasing, cursing, cocaine snorting and a little bit of cooking.
Emilia Jones (who made a big impression in the Oscar-winning CODA) is terrific as Nancy. Leo Woodall (Nuremberg) is great as Sal, a womanizer and hoodlum who makes Tony look respectable in comparison. There’s even a nice little cameo by French chef Eric Ripert, a real-life Bourdain friend.
As for Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers), his portrayal of Bourdain is all about the essence of the man; this isn’t a transformative performance on par with Taron Egerton as Elton John in Rocketman or Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in Vice. Sessa is watchable as he builds this version of Tony, but he’s battling against a lack of narrative credibility.
Dramatic rewrite!
Glance through the opening pages of Kitchen Confidential and the actual circumstances of Bourdain’s trip to Provincetown are rather mundane. He went there with friends, not as a down-on-his-luck Vassar bum with an empty wallet after being thrown out of the restaurant that would become his salvation and subsequently pickpocketed (kicked to the curb, for sure).
Stick that one in the shredder.
Comic relief!
In P-town, Tony meets a generous Portuguese chef who takes him under his wing. That’s Banderas, who cooks up one of the movie’s best elements: a caring, God-fearing, generous, thoughtful owner of a small restaurant who is remarkably patient with a group of guys who should be shown the door. He has one rule: don’t be late for work. If you’re late, you’re fired. That leads to a running joke: Tony is allowed to sleep in a hammock on Chef’s beachside porch in exchange for washing dishes. Not the least bit surprising for this punk, timeliness is not his strong suit. So, Chef douses Tony with a bucket of ocean water as his morning wake-up call.
Stick this one in the compost bin.
Ominous foreshadowing!
In Chef’s lived-in, cozy house is a painting of a French chef, Francois Vatel, who died by suicide after the fish arrived late for a royal event. That bit about Vatel is a true story, but what’s much more interesting is how Bourdain (during a Guardian interview in 2006) spoke about a way Vatel could’ve worked his way out of his predicament if only he ran his cooking operations differently. Instead, Tony wants to use Vatel’s suicide as an eerie foreshadowing of Anthony taking his own life more than 40 years later.
This is a creative choice. One that’s in bad taste.
Big reveal!
As mentioned at the opening, Tony hates being called Anthony because that’s what his mother calls him. So, when did that change? Of course, it’s Chef who advises Tony to go by Anthony instead. It’s more of a man’s name than Tony, he says.
That’s stale. Throw it in the disposal.
Gonna fry now!
Keep in mind, it’s established early Tony’s father is one of the best chefs in New Jersey and Tony got his “first taste” of being a foodie as a kid traveling with his parents in France. But in Tony he’s initially repulsed by the idea of working in the kitchen as a career choice. That’s interesting. What’s not interesting is how Tony’s inability to pull the handle on a potato slicer turns into a Rocky-style victory moment during a montage sequence.
Recycle this one for use another time.
As Tony heats to its own boiling point, Tony repeatedly seems to learn all the wrong things even while working for a chef who seems (in this movie, anyway), to be a truly great guy who could be the ideal mentor.
Instead, Tony keeps making all the wrong moves.
A kitchen fiasco, a foiled house break-in and a clam bake all tie together in a wholly unbelievable way.
But the biggest thud is when Tony, a perpetual liar who won’t let his own lies rest, finally has an epiphany at precisely the wrong moment.
Somehow, against all odds and flying in the face of the entire universe’s better judgment, he finally gets the girl, Nancy, following those remarkably unpleasant circumstances. She stands in front of him nude (off camera). And it’s then when he finally confesses he’s not writing a book, he didn’t win the Vassar fellowship, he sleeps on Chef’s hammock and he did indeed come to Provincetown only to see her.
Not surprisingly, that revelation does not go over well.
The handling of Tony’s big love is off kilter. But the shame of it is, even in the thick of so much fakery, there are some solid moments.
At one point, Tony wants Nancy to take his picture for his book jacket. It’s a nice “shields down” moment when he tells her it’s because he likes how he feels when she looks at him. Gosh. It’s a surprisingly nice thing to say. And Tony, for once, comes across as sincere and vulnerable. And he follows that up with a nifty observation: it’s okay if the photo’s blurry, that’s how you see time anyway.
If only the rest of the movie focused on creating more of those moments, informed by the reality of Anthony Bourdain’s early rough edges and the tolerant people in his life, instead of creating a series of awkward fabrications to tell a half-baked story that is more of a disservice to the man he was than a tribute to the man he became.