Before you press play
Watch if
You want a grubby, warm coming-of-age story with two performances worth the ticket.
Wait if
Constant casual drug use in almost every scene is a dealbreaker, or you wanted a biopic that covers a whole life.
Tony is a coming-of-age film about a nineteen-year-old who cannot stop lying, and the smartest thing it does is refuse to let him off. Matt Johnson folds Anthony Bourdain's formative years into a single summer, drops him in a spectacularly filthy Provincetown kitchen and lets the room do the work. It lands. It also never surprises you, and that gap is the whole review.
One thing to hold onto first: this is not a reconstruction of a documented summer. Matt Johnson has said he compressed Anthony Bourdain's youth, roughly ages ten to twenty-five, into a single season at nineteen. The Flagship was real and Bourdain really washed dishes there, though the book renames it the Dreadnaught; Chef is an amalgam of several mentors, and Sal blends a figure from the memoir with a cook from years later. It works better as an emotional origin story than as biography, and every change runs the same way, towards something warmer and tidier than the life was.
The Flagship kitchen, and the company Tony keeps
Tony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) arrives in Provincetown in the summer of 1975 chasing a girl and carrying a lie about a writing fellowship he did not win. He takes a dishwashing job at The Flagship because the alternative is admitting he is broke, and the kitchen he walks into is genuinely disgusting. Grease everywhere, open hostility, people being sick a few feet from the food.
The place is grim rather than sinister, and the film is careful about the difference.
The kitchen gets cleaner as the film goes on. It is the best idea in here and Matt Johnson never once explains it. Tony's head clears and the room clears with him.
Dominic Sessa as Tony Bourdain
The performance works because Dominic Sessa plays the arrogance as a cover rather than a trait. Tony corrects people, points out their errors and inflates his own story, and none of it comes from confidence. He is running his mother's routine on strangers because it is the only version of authority anyone has shown him.
The film's Gladys Bourdain (Dagmara Domińczyk) is critical in the way that turns a child into a performer, and Tony has decided she is the one who got it right. So he spends the summer auditioning for people who are not her. The lies pile up fast and stay legible: he tells Nancy Putkoski (Emilia Jones) he is a writer working a kitchen for research, then tells the kitchen not to mention him to Nancy.
Dominic Sessa keeps him likeable through a summer of doing almost nothing likeable. What does not quite land is the age. He is playing nineteen and reads older, and the film asks for a lot of naivety from a face that has clearly worked a few things out.
Antonio Banderas as Chef
Chef (Antonio Banderas) is the warmest thing in the film. He hires Tony, lets him sleep on a hammock, marches him to church, wakes him by throwing water in his face and teaches him to cook properly. Tony guesses his age at somewhere in his forties, out by the better part of two decades, which tells you how closely this boy looks at anyone but himself.
Antonio Banderas plays him as a man working a long way below his ability, and the film takes its time telling you why.
Leo Woodall as Sal, and the Flagship crew
Sal (Leo Woodall) is the other pole and the harder character to write. He is bad company, and Tony is honest that bad company is often the only company available at nineteen. Tony wants to be him for a while. You can see on Dominic Sessa's face that he already knows better, which is the most interesting thing the performance does.
The ensemble is uniformly good, which is rarer than it sounds. Mary (Monica Raymund), Stavros (Stavros Halkias) and Tyrone (Michael Jibrin) get sketched in fast and never feel like furniture. Nobody here is coasting.
A note on the drugs. The R rating names drug use, pervasive language and sexual content, and the first of those is close to constant, in the kitchen and out of it. There is no recovery arc and no lesson attached. What is telling is where the damage lands. Tony takes whatever is going around, and the wreckage is handed almost entirely to Sal, which lets the film keep its hero reckless without ever making him pay for it.
Is Tony worth watching?
Yes, with a ceiling. The film argues that your choices belong to whoever is standing next to you, and it makes that case cleanly through a kitchen, a mentor and a friend who is going nowhere. What it will not do is catch you out. Every beat arrives within a few minutes of where you would guess it lands.
One thing does not survive a second thought, and it is a screenplay problem rather than a biographical one. Within the film's own chronology a nineteen-year-old takes his parents' money and vanishes for a summer without provoking any visible alarm. He gets word home eventually, and the film still never accounts for the silence before that.
Three out of five, and a GLOWING. Tony is a good film about a bad liar learning to be worth something, carried by two performances and one quietly excellent visual idea. It will not change your week. It will comfortably fill an evening.
Sal's exit. Sal (Leo Woodall) turns up late and wrecked, shoves Tony (Dominic Sessa) aside when he steps in, then punches Chef (Antonio Banderas). What follows is the part that actually lands. Sal immediately begs to be hit back, over and over, because he knows what he has just thrown away. Chef refuses him. It is the only moment in the film where a man asks to be punished and is denied, and it leaves Tony visibly shaken about the company he has been keeping.
The kitchen after Sal. The room brightens once he is gone. That is the argument of the whole film compressed into set dressing: Tony was not himself in that company, and the walls change to prove it.
The fire. Tony talks Chef into cooking properly for once and invites Nancy Putkoski (Emilia Jones) in to watch him do it, then stares at her instead of the oil. The extinguisher is empty. The Flagship burns. An hour of a boy carefully building a story about himself goes up in the time it takes a pan to catch, and the confession that follows costs him Nancy and Chef in the same night.
Chef's past. The reveal that he trained at the Culinary Institute of America arrives as a joke, because nobody in the room hears anything but the initials. Then it reframes him completely. He is not a small-town cook who took Tony in out of kindness. He is a very good chef hiding from something, which makes what he spent on this boy considerably more expensive than it looked.
Cooking for his mother. He goes home and cooks, and Gladys Bourdain (Dagmara Domińczyk) is impressed. The film lets maternal approval be the payoff rather than romantic reconciliation, and it is the right call. Her approval matters because Tony has spent the whole film performing for it; that does not mean the way she treated him was ever justified.
Anthony. At the Culinary Institute interview he gives his name as Anthony rather than Tony, and the panel reacts to the arrogance exactly as everyone has all summer. Then they read Chef's recommendation letter and let him in. The name change is the film: Tony was the performance, Anthony is the one who did the work.
Bright Bulbs
- The hazing curdles into something like family without a single scene announcing it, which is the hardest ensemble note to land.
- A running gag about being woken with a bucket of water quietly becomes the clearest measure of Tony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) growing up.
- Antonio Banderas underplays Chef so far that the mentorship reads as ordinary decency rather than destiny, and the film is better for it.
Dull Bulbs
- You will know roughly where this is going twenty minutes in, and the film is content to let you be right.
- Dominic Sessa is a compelling nineteen-year-old and a slightly implausible one, which costs a few of the naive beats their sting.
Shattered Bulbs
- The screenplay needs Tony's family to stay quiet for an entire summer and never supplies a reason, which is a hole you can see coming.
Cast
- Dominic Sessa as Tony Bourdain
- Antonio Banderas as Chef
- Emilia Jones as Nancy Putkoski
- Leo Woodall as Sal
- Monica Raymund as Mary
- Stavros Halkias as Stavros
- Michael Jibrin as Tyrone
- Dagmara Domińczyk as Gladys Bourdain
- Rich Sommer as Pierre Bourdain